The problem is not that Sam has some totally unique DNA. Customers are reacting to 1) the board’s apparent rejection of the existing products and business model, and 2) the capricious and incompetent way the board handled this.
Companies are making huge bets, and a seemingly stable and industry-leading supplier just turned out to be unreliable. Of course people are angry and hesitant to keep doing business with OpenAI.
Observing from the outside, it feels like the bulk of the credit goes to their AI team and that Sam was just there to make sure the machine was well oiled. Maybe he was really good at that, I don't know. Their productization of models wasn't that great, starting with the name, "ChatGPT". IMO, the real driving force has been the unparalleled capabilities of their models rather than branding or marketing.
It seems this was a coup of Microsoft together with Altman to go full force ahead with the commercial upscaling.
In the past there was already a small uprising, and all who didn't like the Altman cult ran off to anthropic. So all that's left in openai are huge fans of Altman. So it only makes sense that you piss off almost all remaining employees, its survivor bias at work.
