Welcome to the Techmeme Ride Home for Tuesday, November 21, 2023. I'm Brian McCullod today. The Sam Altman Thing Is Nowhere Near Resolved. But what does that mean, especially for Microsoft? Elon, Sue's media matters, and if your YouTube videos have been behaving strangely of late, I think I can tell you why. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. So what if I told you that seemingly nothing has been resolved in this whole Sam Altman
situation? Sources are telling the verge that Sam Altman's move to Microsoft is not a done deal. He and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman are apparently open to returning to OpenAI if the remaining board members who fired Altman resign. Quote, the promised mass exodus of virtually every open AI employee, including board member and chief scientist Ilya Suskevar, who led the initial move to depose Altman, means that there is more pressure on the board
than ever, with only two of the three remaining members needing to flip. Altman posted on X that quote, we are all going to work together some way or another, which we are told is meant to indicate that the fight continues. Altman, former president Brockman and the companies investors are still trying to find a graceful exit for the board, say multiple
sources with direct knowledge of the situation. The sources characterize the hiring announcement by Microsoft, which needed to have a resolution to the crisis before the stock market opened on Monday, as a quote holding pattern. After Altman was suddenly fired on Friday negotiations with the board to potentially bring him back reached a stalemate, while OpenAI's management team and investors were vetting candidates to replace the board for Altman's potential
return, the board was quietly conducting its own CEO search in parallel. Late Sunday, the board announced that Emmett Sheer, the co-founder of Twitch, would be CEO, seemingly putting an end to the possibility of Altman coming back. There has been a non-stop power struggle inside OpenAI since Friday, with nearly all employees against the now three-person board
that opposes Altman. Employees at the company's San Francisco headquarters refused to attend an emergency all-hands scheduled on Sunday with new CEO Emmett Sheer, according to a person familiar with the matter, who added that they responded to the announcement in OpenAI's Slack with an FU emoji. Later that evening, Susquevere flipped on the board, even though
he had played a key role in the ousting of Altman just days earlier. His name was on an open letter to the board on Monday calling for them to resign and reinstate Altman, which nearly the whole company has now signed. On Monday, employees started posting on social media that they are continuing to keep the lights on and maintain service stability for OpenAI's developers, which were told is being done to ensure the company doesn't fully implode
while the board is pressured to resign. New CEO Emmett Sheer has so far been unable to get written documentation of the board's detailed reasoning for firing Altman, which also hasn't been shared with the company's investors, according to people familiar with the situation. He said in a note to employees Sunday night that his first order of business would be to quote, higher and independent investigator to dig into the entire process leading up to
this point and generate a full report. After this story was published, Microsoft CEO Sachin Nadella appeared on CNBC and Bloomberg TV when asked directly by CNBC's John Fort if Sam Altman and OpenAI's staffers would join Microsoft. Nadella said, quote, that is for the OpenAI board and management and employees to choose. He followed by saying that Microsoft, chose to explicitly partner with OpenAI and obviously that depends on the people at OpenAI
staying there or coming to Microsoft, so I'm open to both options and quote. On the topic of whether Microsoft needs a seat on OpenAI's board, he said that quote, it's clear something has to change around the governance. We will have a good dialogue with their board on
that and walk through that as that evolves and quote. The remaining board holdouts who oppose Altman are Quora CEO and D'Angelo, former Geosim systems CEO Tasha McCulley and Helen Toner, the director of strategy at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
They have so far not responded to the Verges request for comment and quote. Yeah, for me, the biggest question mark about this story at this point aside from how it eventually resolves is what's up with the board, assuming in good faith that they are taking a stand on principle, something about slowing the development of AI perhaps. It's hard to see
how blowing up OpenAI achieves their ends. It seems to be clear that if they were to stick to their guns, the majority of OpenAI's talent would just reconstitute itself elsewhere, perhaps under Microsoft's auspices. Like number one, what cards do they have left to play?
And number two, if one of their points of principle is that they don't want to be himeth like Microsoft calling the shots on AI development, not only does that ship seem to have sailed, but the leverage that they had with OpenAI's non-profit structure seems
to have evaporated as well. This board seems to be the biggest black box here pun intended in terms of motivation and strategy, though they seem to be trying something as was indicated in one of those previous quotes sources told the information that OpenAI's board offered the interim CEO role to former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and scale AI CEO Alex Wang before
Emmett Sheer accepted the role. But they're also reporting that the board also approached andthropic CEO Dario Amodai about a potential merger as part of an effort to persuade Amodai to replace Sam Altman as CEO, which suggests that they had some sort of a plan, quote,
it's not clear whether the merger proposal led to any serious discussion Amodai quickly turned down the CEO offered due to his position at Anthropic, the two-year-old startup which sells Claude, a chatbot that competes with OpenAI's chat GBT, is in fierce competition with OpenAI to recruit researchers and win customers. The proposal for a merger is a major turnabout for OpenAI, which until Friday had been the clear leader in a race to develop
generative AI products. Amodai is also a former employee of OpenAI, who with a group of others left in late 2020 to launch Anthropic over concerns the company was moving too quickly to commercialize its technology. Amodai has been an outspoken advocate of the need for caution in AI development at a conference in September. Amodai stressed the need for increased regulation to make sure AI systems can't be used for nefarious purposes like developing
biological weapons. Anthropic has a large team of staff focused on ensuring alignment or making sure AI reflects human values. The board's decision to approach Amodai for the CEO job stands out in light of OpenAI employee disagreements that preceded Altman's
ouster around where the company was developing its AI safely enough. OpenAI co-founder and board member Ilya Suskevar, who fired Altman after the board voted to remove him, had been co-leading a research team working on technical solutions to prevent its AI systems from running rogue. A merger between OpenAI and Anthropic would be a messy situation for Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, who have all used their cloud computing businesses to get closer to
one or other of the companies. Microsoft is an investor in OpenAI as well as its exclusive cloud provider. Anthropic signed multi-billion dollar cloud computing deals with Amazon and Google, which both invested in the AI startup. Anthropic has told some investors it has been generating revenue at a $100 million annualized rate the information has previously
reported, implying it has generated more than $8 million in revenue per month. Those numbers are expected to grow significantly in the coming months due to a recent deal with Amazon web services in which AWS will sell Anthropics AI software to cloud customers and quote. Life doesn't happen by weekly, so why should pay day? The money you earn can be in your hands today with earning. Earn in is an app that gives you access to your pay as you work
up to $100 per day or up to $750 per pay period. Just download the earning app and verify your paycheck, then access up to $100 a day as you work and leave an optional tip. Any money you access plus tips are automatically repaid from your next paycheck. I love managing
my salary like I manage the pay flow in my businesses. Make earning a part of your financial routine and join earnings over 3.5 million customers who say, when I think about earning, I think about financial stability, security, it gives me a lot of peace of mind. Download earning today spelled E-A-R-N-I-N in the Google Play or Apple App Store. When you download the earning app, type in TechMeme under podcast. When you sign up, it will
really help the show. TechMeme under podcast, subject to your available earnings, daily max and pay period max, seatearning.com slash TOS for details. Earn in is a financial technology company, not a bank. Bank products are issued by Evolve Bank of Trust member FDIC. I've been telling you about the new season of Traceroute and it's finally launched. They
kicked it off by exploring one of my favorite topics and probably one of yours too. The ongoing and challenging relationship between humanity and artificial intelligence is AI, our friend or our worst enemy. You won't want to miss season 3 of Traceroute as it returns to your favorite podcast listening platform. Traceroute is a podcast about the people who shape our digital world. Every story peels back the layers of the stack to reveal the
humanity in the hardware. Season 3 will explore topics that can potentially shape our society in profound ways such as the intersection of tech and conservation and how researchers are using machine learning and robotics to debug an invasive species to offer unique solutions to ecological crises and digital migration for the preservation of history, culture and land. I loved seasons one and two and I'm so excited. Season three is finally
here. Get keyed into the conversation now. Listen and subscribe to the new season of Traceroute on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Check out Traceroute now. Which, let's do some more on that Microsoft situation. I was fascinated by this thread on Twitter from Matthew Prince, the co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. I'm going to quote the entire thing in full. Quoting now. I'm told mine is a contrarian view of the events of the
last few days. So here goes contrary to what at Kevin Rose and others have written Microsoft was not a winner of the events of the last few days around hashtag open AI. They were
in a much better place on Friday morning last week than they are today. Friday morning they had invested around $11 billion in open AI and captured most of its upside while still having enough insulated distance to allow at Brad SMI to claim things to regulators like quote, chat GPT is more open than met Islam and do allow any embarrassing LLM hallucinations or other ugliness to be open AI's problem, not Microsoft's Sunday morning. They were
at their lowest point. There was real risk. They lose all their $11 billion investment and look like absolute fools for making that size of investment without any real governance controls. Very smart people who have followed the news carefully, including some big fund managers who hold Microsoft are still peeing me asking how is that even possible. Today they are better off than Sunday morning, but far, far worse off than they were Friday morning.
Sure, they will likely hire a bunch of the open AI team, but that doesn't get them much they didn't have before and it comes with a ton of new reputational risk. They now own responsibility for any hallucinations or other ugliness and execution risk. See deep mind within Google for how all the smartest people in AI can still get stymied by the bureaucracy
of a giant company. I think the chances of the senior open AI folks still being at Microsoft in three years is asymptotically approaching zero, where the independence and clear mission of open AI was exactly what could have kept that group of incredible talent motivated and aligned over the long term, making office 365 spreadsheets a bit more clever isn't something
that rallies a team like theirs. Sure, they'll try and have some level of independence, but the machinery of a trillion dollar plus business software behemoth is hard to not get caught up in and ground out by. This was a very bad weekend for Microsoft and for that matter open AI. I don't see any winners maybe at Elon Musk or at Benioff indirectly. It could have been worse, but it still has been a disaster for everyone directly involved.
We're not at the end of this story, but I don't see a lot of ways in the short term. It gets better for Microsoft and really hard to see how it could get better even over the long term than it looked for them and open AI Friday morning last week. In other words, sometimes owning a call option on an asset is better for multiple reasons than owning the asset itself. Last week Microsoft roughly owned a call option on open AI. Today at
the end of the year, they owned some fraction of the asset itself. Today is a bit of a mirror image of yesterday's episode because now I need to tell you that X has followed through and filed a defamation lawsuit against media matters claiming the outlet quote, knowingly and maliciously misrepresented the amount of anti-Semitic content on X. Quoting the rap Elon Musk has followed through on his threat to sue watchdog organization media matters.
I'll be it later in the day than he threatened over the weekend in a suit filed on Monday Musk claims that the group quote, knowingly and maliciously misrepresented the amount of anti-Semitic content on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Watchdog organization media matters released a report on Thursday that accused X of placing ads
for brands next to pro Hitler and white nationalist accounts. Musk announced on Saturday that he would be filing a quote, thermonuclear lawsuit against media matters quote, the slits second the court opens on Monday, not a single authentic user on X saw IBM's Comcasts
or oracles ads next to the content in media matters article Linda Yaccarino asserted in a post on X only two users saw apples ad next to the content at least one of which was media matters and quote, while not naming a specific dollar amount the suit seeks quote
actual and consequential damages caused by defendants misconduct and quote along with an injunction to take down its article from both its site and social media that alleged X was placing ads for major brands next to anti-Semitic content and quote.
Finally today YouTube has confirmed that quote users who have ad blockers installed may experience sub optimal viewing after users reported five second delays on non chrome web browsers quoting Android authority YouTube has been on a monetization push recently as it began blocking ad blockers and pushing users to buy YouTube premium. The move makes sense in many ways as the platform needs to make money to survive and compensate creators who depend
on the platform for their living. But some other actions by YouTube make less sense users are now reporting that YouTube has begun slowing down its desktop website for some Firefox and Edge users and we are perplexed. Redditor VK 6 underscore has shared a video showing a five second delay when loading into a YouTube video on Mozilla Firefox upon manually changing
the user agent on the browser to Chrome the five second delay no longer appears. Redditor VK 6 underscore notes that this isn't a bug on Firefox the JavaScript code for the YouTube client on the desktop reportedly contains code that adds the artificial five second delay others have chimed in pointing out the exact place to find this piece of code we can confirm that the above mentioned snippet of code exists. However we cannot confirm if the code does
indeed add a five second delay after checking for the user's browser of choice. However multiple users have reported the same across Firefox and Edge. The users claim to have experienced the delay without any extensions enabled indicating that the delay could be on a per account basis. The delay also does not trigger just once it is reportedly triggered
every time YouTube links are opened in a new tab. YouTube has provided a statement on the issue clarifying that the issue is related to ad blockers and not with browsers quote to support a diverse ecosystem of creators globally and allow billions to access their favorite content on YouTube. We've launched an effort to urge viewers with ad blockers enabled
to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube premium for an ad free experience. Users who have ad blockers installed may experience suboptimal viewing regardless of the browser they are using. This does not completely explain how the five second delay goes away when using Google Chrome though, but it gives us good clarity on the behavior users who experience the delay are advised to either allow ads for YouTube or subscribe to YouTube premium and quote.
Alright very important housekeeping notes for you. It is Thanksgiving week here in the US so as I do every year I'm only doing two shows this week. This is the last live show of the week. But since every time I've taken time off this year we've lost listeners I've grown paranoid so I'm going to make sure you all have something every single day
that I'm gone. First up tomorrow at the usual time a portfolio profile episode if you're working in AI at all and you need to get your hands on some Nvidia GPUs you're going to want to hear about SF compute a company in the right home AI fund not only do they have chips for you to use but also if you listen to the episode there's an exclusive email
address for our listeners that will help you jump the line. Come for that but stay to hear a really interesting take on the whole AI ecosystem from folks who are integral to the cerebral valley scene. Then the rest of the week a bunch of internet history podcast episodes Thursday Thanksgiving Day my chapter episode on how the dot com bubble happened Friday and Saturday I'm going to replay parts one and two of the Gary Kildall legend
because it's fascinating the man who could have been Bill Gates I've reposted this before I think four years ago but I'm doing it again because it's the most produced podcast I've ever done one that I'm probably the most proud of and then on Sunday the story
of the first blogger in quotes at first in quotes I should say Justin Hall because I think his story is one of the most fascinating interviews I've ever done even from a philosophical level the arc of Hall's life from being an extremely online person long before that was
ever a thing to rejecting social media and online life completely to eventually coming back to it hopefully in a more mature way I think it has some profound things to say about how our society in general has evolved with social media and living our lives online generally enjoy all that enjoy turkey day if you observe it and talk to you on Monday the 27th