You can either act like a professional and control the messaging or let others fill the vacuum with idle speculation. I'm quite frankly in shock as to the level of responsibility displayed by people whose position should demand high function.

My favorite hypothesis: Ilya et al suspected emergent AGI (e.g. saw the software doing things unprompted or dangerous and unexpected) and realized the Worldcoin shill is probably not the one you want calling the shots on it.

For the record, I don't think it's true. I think it was a power play, and a failed coup at that. But it's about as substantiated as the "serious" hypotheses being mooted in the media. And it's more fun.

No serious company wants drama. Hopefully OpenAI is still a serious company.

A statement from the CEO/the board is a standard descalation.

The speculations are rampant precisely because the board has said absolute nothing since the leadership transition announcement on Friday.

If they had openly given literally any imaginable reason to fire Sam Altman, the ratio of employees threatening to quit wouldn't be as high as 95% right now.

> HN will have all sorts of wild opinions about what's going on and we can't have that!

Uh, or investors and customers will? Yes, people are going to speculate, as you point out, which is not good.

> we might realize this is not all that important in the end and move on to other news items!

It's important to some of us.

Thank you! I get the sense that none of this matters and it's all a massive distraction.

News

Company which does research and doesn't care about money makes a decision to do something which aligns with research and not caring about money.

From the OpenAI website...

"it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world"

Big tech co makes a move which sends its stock to an all time high. Creates research team.

Seems like there could be a "The Martian" meme here... we're going to Twitter the sh* out of this.

Convincing two constituencies: employees and customers, that your company isn't just yolo-ing things like ceos and so forth seems like it is a pretty good use of ceo time!

OpenAI becoming a Microsoft department is awful from an X risk point of view.

I cannot say whether you deserve the downvotes, but an alternative and grounded perspective is appreciated in this maelstrom of news, speculation and drama.

They have customers and people deciding if they want to be customers.

This sarcastic post is the best understanding of public relations I've seen in an HN post.