My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bungelung Cargoton woman from Gadigol Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.
Good morning and welcome to the Daily os It's Tuesday, the twenty first of November. I'm Sam, I'm Zarah. It's nice to be back on the podcast. Sarah. It is nice to be a week away. You and I are traversing across the world doing some.
Interesting I look forward to this month being our next best month of podcast listeners, now that we also haven't been here for a week.
Yes, the myth of listens going up when you and I are not here and a half years ago. Okay, what are we going to talk about today?
So last week one of the biggest names in artificial intelligence, arguably the only name I know in artificial intelligence, Sam Altman. He was removed as CEO of open Ai, the tech company behind chat GPT.
If this technology goes wrong. It can go quite wrong, and we want to be vocal about that. We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening. Now. Oltman co founded the company with Elon Musk. Might have heard of him, and news of the board's decision to dump him as CEO has taken many in tech and business by surprise.
There are plenty of questions surrounding his departure. So in the deep Dive today, I want to take you through what we know about why Oltman was ousted. Before we get there, though, Sam, what is making headlines.
The CEO of Optus, Kelly Bayo Rosemarin, has resigned after a mass network outage earlier this month, which left ten million Aussies without phone services. The outage occurred due to a software upgrade, and over two hundred and twenty calls
to Triple zero failed to get through. During a Senate hearing on Friday, rosemarn denied rumors that she was down, but in a statement from Singtel, which is Optus's parent company, yesterday, she said, having now had time for some personal reflection, I have come to the decision that my resignation is in the best interests of optis moving.
Forward, gender affirming procedures could be subsidized by Medicare. The Medical Services Advisory Committee is considering an application that would subsidize gender affirming surgery procedures, including facial and genital procedures, chess surgery, and voice surgery. That's in a bid to improve the quality of life of transgender people. The Committee is an independent body that assesses and advises the government on whether a new medical service should be publicly funded.
Over three thousand fires have broken out in Brazil this month, destroying nearly seven hundred and seventy thousand hectares of the largest tropical wetlands in the world. In the same period last year, there were fewer than seventy fires in the area. Endangered jaguars and more than one hundred and fifty other mammal species are at risk from the destruction of habitat caused by the blazers.
And the Good News. Gases produced by landfill in the Act will be used to power over ten thousand homes. The new gas expansion project at the Canberra Landfill Facility will reduce carbon emissions by using methane from landfill to then generate power. Once it's completed, the site should be able to generate fifty thousand megawatt hours of energy. All right, Sam, tell me, are you planning to set up a globally defining tech company in the future.
No, globally defining media company would be nice. But it's nice to be talking about Sam again. However, I am noticing that every time there is a Sam on the podcast, it's not for great reasons.
No, And I mean, if this is the first episode you've listened to, we did an episode a week before last about Sam Bankman free who was the founder of FTX, and he was a tech founder who is now in jail. This story is not following the same trajectory, but indeed is another story I guess of the uber powerful like very well known, very successful founder's named Sam, who are having a bit of a fall from grace.
So why don't we start off with a bit more information about Sam Altman? What do we need to know about him as a founder?
So? Sam Altman is a thirty eight year old co founder of the company that owns chat GPT. Now that parent company is called open Ai, And though we've only really been speaking about it recently, it actually was founded in twenty fifteen, I thought I would ask the product of Sam Altman's brain chat GPT exactly who Sam Altman is, and here's what it said. Sam Altman is a well known entrepreneur and investor and has been involved in various
projects and organizations, including co chairing open Ai. So that's what the free version of chat GPT told me. But because we don't pay for it, we don't have any info past January twenty twenty two, so it doesn't actually involve any news of his sacking in that summary. But his backstory is I guess exactly what we've come to expect from a tech quiz. In an interview with a New Yorker, he said he disassembled a Macintosh computer when
he was eight years old. Another Sam trade the most serifying MI is, I actually could see you doing that.
I would love that. I think of it as like really complex lego.
Yeah right, what all eight year olds are doing there? Definitely, And that was actually around the same time that he started to get into computer programming.
Very cool.
In two thousand and five, when he was at Stanford University, Altman turned to his friend and said, wouldn't it be great if I could open my mobile phone and see a map of where all my friends are. I know that that idea doesn't seem so wild now that iPhones and other tech we regularly engage with can do that, but in the early two thousands that was still a long way off. So Altman became inspired by the idea of launching an app with some and he ended up
dropping out of UNI to do just that. Altman has also got his own cryptocurrency called world Coin, currently has millions of users around the world.
So it does seem like, even from a tender age of age, he was destined for this career in tech. How did he end up though, not just being another tech whiz, but actually a really defining AI whiz.
Well, Oltman was involved in what's now called as effective altruism for many years before he got into AI.
What do you mean by that.
Well, in the business world, it's basically all about building a company that's focused on improving the welfare of society. So investors like Altman wanted to put money into these sorts of businesses. And hang in here because it actually explains how we got to the point of a co founder being kicked out of his own company. So just put a pin in that we will come back to that later. Pin put in, Yeah, okay, but the whole point of effective altruism is to keep focused on promoting
a vision rather than being purely focused on profit. In twenty fifteen, Altman launched open ai with Elon Musk who Yep, no background needed. But the company's mission was to quote advanced digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate a financial return. Very lofty ambition there, i'd say, and at the outset, which I think is really interesting. Open ai was actually listed as a non profit organization.
Wow, so basically a charity pretty much.
It was initially relying on donations to do its work and was governed by the same laws as charities would be. About three years later, though the company changed its structure. It kept the nonprofit side of things and then launched a subsidiary company called open ai Global, where it could raise some money and could hire world leading talent. Because unfortunately, Silicon Valley tech bros. Don't come for free.
So they basically split off the company and made a nonprofit BIT and then a for profit.
Bit exactly and They also got huge backing from investor The biggest one that we know of was from Microsoft, obviously tech giant. They announced a big partnership with open Ai earlier this year, and that was estimated to be worth around ten billion dollars. So what you end up with is quite an interesting company, and also a board that's made up of six people, none of them are investors in the company, which I'd say is pretty rare.
Yeah, very rare.
Yeah. What was also quite unusual was that Altman actually admitted he didn't have any shares in his own company. I have no equity in OPENINGI.
You need a lawyer or an agent. I'm doing this because I love it. Interesting because he was really passionate about that not for profit bit, but it was the for profit bit that had the shareholders because they were the ones that put money into the company.
It's so interesting and it's suddenly unorthodox. Under this new structure, Sam Altman was appointed CEO, and he was also made one of the six board members. Three of them worked for open Ai, and three of them were directors of other companies. And that brings us up to speed on open Ai. That is, until a board meeting last.
Week really interesting situation. You have this company that's quite literally developing something with the whole world watching, and we're all tingering around with it.
The only thing people were talking about it like the first six months of this year.
It's very rare that a company comes across the world and changes the ways that we could work and we could live right. This one did it. But all of this is now for sam Oltman at least come crumbling down.
What's happened, basically, sam Oltman was fired as CEO by his own company, so late last week, open AI released a statement saying that board members had lost confidence in Altman because he was not quote consistently candid with them. I don't fully know what that means, but it clearly has something to do with transparency or honesty or something of that nature. A statement from the board of directors said that open AI was grateful for Altman's contributions to
the founding and the growth of the company. The chair of the board, Greg Brockman, was also removed and said he was excluded from the vote to oust Altman as CEO. A joint statement from Altman and Brockman said they were shocked and saddened by the decisions.
So I have to reiterate, this is a really strange situation to have a founder being sacked by his own company but he doesn't even have shares in his own company. It's just a very odd structure.
It is. But it's not the first time we've seen something like this.
There have been some other high profile ones, right, Yeah.
So Steve Jobs was fired by Apple in nineteen eighty five after he had a tiff with the company's board of directors. I remember when we were writing our book because we have a section on tech, I went really deep into this because I was so intrigued by it because.
He returned, he got brought back to Yeah.
And I just can't imagine the egos and what actually happens with like personality politics to be kicked out and then re enter. Anyway, that's an aside. So there was Apple, and then there was also Eduardo Saverron who was a co founder of Facebook. He had his shares diluted in an effort to reduce his power of the company, which you may remember from the pivotal scene in the Social network.
I think we were going to let you parade around in your ridiculous suits, pretending you were running the.
Summary my brothers at the cleaners, along with my honey and my fuck you flip flops.
You pretentious douchebag securities here. You'll be leaving now.
And recently, the board of directors of Uber forced co founder Travis Kalanik to resign in twenty seventeen after allegations of sexual harassment at the company.
So that's clearly a different situation to what we have on our hands here, but nonetheless the same result. Altman is gone. What's going to happen with the company now?
So the board announced an interim CEO, But there has been a lot of speculation over the weekend that Altman could actually somehow get.
Back into the company Steve jobstyle.
He posted on x saying I love the Open Ai team so much, and the new CEO shared it with a blue love heart emoji. This is truly a sign of the times when you know, major kaida well defining companies are having their through half heart energies. But there are reports in the media that Altmand went to open Ai headquarters over the weekend to have talks about returning as CEO, and he has the support of some big
investors and senior figures at the company. We don't know for sure what the discussions with the board have been about, but Altman did leave us a clue. On social media. He posted a selfie wearing a guest lanyard that read first and last Home I ever wear one of these.
This is a very odd It's all very odd, this situation.
It's just like a TV show.
But I just think it will be a TV show.
But I think, you know, this is an interesting one of you know, we often speak about whether something is news or noise at the daily I was like, this is talking about this meaningful? Is it important that we talk about or is it just you know, big tech leaders and their ego. And I do think that this one especially is really important to discuss because at least in our industry, something like chatchipt has the power to literally change from the bottom up how this industry works.
I agree, And I think who is leading chat ChiPT is news.
Like whoever's hands that ends up in Yeah, Like, you know, just as we saw Elon Musk's ownership of X really changed the game, there is something to be said about who is taking the reins of these platforms, and especially with such little regulation because it's such a new thing. I do think this is a really interesting story in and of itself, but then also of course in the broader kind of pattern of these big tech leaders just falling like dominos.
And just in the quick update to this story that only broke late last night here in Australia, Microsoft has hired Sam Altman to lead their advanced AI research team. They've actually hired him and Greg Brockman, and it's come almost immediately after the pair left Open AI. So Microsoft's chief executive announced the surprise move and basically said that they still believe in the products that Sam Moltman and Greg Brockman have to make and that they want them
to do it at Microsoft instead. Has this interesting subplot of what is happening with the way that these founders are setting up their companies and how do you end up in a position where something like that being ousted is even possible. And surely, after some of the examples that we ran through, someone as smart you know, he was making computers at that years old, someone of the smartest Sam Moltman would have put some safeguards in place to not get kicked out. But turns out he didn't.
That's all for today's episode of The Daily Os. We'll be back again tomorrow. If you enjoyed this episode, would love you to leave a rating on Spotify or even comment on Apple. It really helps us get in front of more people and helps us keep our job as founders. For now Thinking appealed to Don the peace and comment