HANDMADE_INC

MAKE SOMETHING WONDERFUL

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_Why OpenAI Fired Sam Altman in November 2023?

On November 17, 2023, OpenAI's board fired Sam Altman with one sentence: he had not been "consistently candid in his communications."

Microsoft found out one minute before the public. Five days later, Altman was back.

That is the story everyone watched.

This film explores the underlying causes of the crisis: a kid fixing a VCR in St. Louis, the dot-com bubble, Paul Graham and Y Combinator, seventy years of AI research, a dinner with Elon Musk, and the 2019 decision to put a for-profit company under the nonprofit.

CHAPTERS:

0:00 Intro
0:57 The dot-com bubble
5:20 Y Combinator
9:08 The big picture
13:50 What can go wrong?
18:07 OpenAI
23:10 ChatGPT
26:31 Five days to decide the future
31:20 Artificial general intelligence

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Dieter Rams on V&A.

"They changed their styling things every two years to sell new ones, which has nothing to do with good design."

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¹ Phone (3a) — rear detail, Nothing

² OP–XY, teenage engineering

³ Mallow lamps, Leonard Bessemer / Objects for Objects; bulbs by Tala

⁴ Sunbeam Captured II, Sabine Marcelis and Boris Acket, 2025; project photography and video credited to Boris Acket and Aad Hoogendoorn

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Patrick Steward,
1940-2026

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Rick Rubin on David Senra.

"If you're stacking a lot of things on top of each other, each one of those things becomes less important."

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¹ George Nakashima crafting at Camp Minidoka, Francis Stewart

² Conoid Chair Drawing, George Nakashima

³ Board with Butterfly Drawing, George Nakashima

⁴ Straight Chair production, Nakashima Woodworkers; design by George Nakashima; photography by Knoll

⁵ Straight Chair and Splay-Leg Table, George Nakashima; photography by Knoll

⁶ Conoid Studio exterior, George Nakashima; engineering by Weidlinger Associates; photograph by Don Freeman

[Nestor Valles @nstrvs]

What do you do when you care about design and your employer doesn’t?

The truth is that a very small percentage of founders care about the same things designers do. And of those, only a few are competent enough to maintain high standards.

Designers often don’t realize how hard it is to maintain high standards in a business.

It’s exhausting. That’s why so few companies get it right. Look at Apple today. It’s no longer what it used to be. Even at that scale, with all that money, maintaining that standard over time is incredibly hard.

And if you’re working with a founder who doesn’t share that commitment, I’m sorry, but you’re never going to get there.

So if you really, really, really care about quality and are willing to go the extra mile, put in the extra hours, and get the details right, you should either find a founder who really cares about quality or start your own thing.

[Jota @lif3isag4me]

Intuition follows the same principle every other capacity you have does, use it or lose it. Ignore you inner voice long enough and it atrophies, do as it says and you might create something worth remembering.

Here’s a brief piece about the craftsman that taught me this principle

[Nestor Valles @nstrvs]

People told Haruki Murakami his jazz bar would fail. When it thrived, they told him not to sell it.

He sold it so he can have 2 years free of obligations to try himself as a writer.

Read the full story:

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Arithmetic, written law, theory of gravity, computers. None of it was inevitable. None was destined to exist.

Each one was made because someone had an idea and fought with the limitations of reality to make it happen.

And to make it well.

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If you're ambitious and you value craftsmanship, entrepreneurship is the only path to creative freedom.

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13/13 September 25, 2024
https://t.co/Nq9WtyjmNQ

[Mira Murati @miramurati]

I shared the following note with the OpenAI team today.

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_Why OpenAI Fired Sam Altman in November 2023?

On November 17, 2023, OpenAI's board fired Sam Altman with one sentence: he had not been "consistently candid in his communications."

Microsoft found out one minute before the public. Five days later, Altman was back.

That is the story everyone watched.

This film explores the underlying causes of the crisis: a kid fixing a VCR in St. Louis, the dot-com bubble, Paul Graham and Y Combinator, seventy years of AI research, a dinner with Elon Musk, and the 2019 decision to put a for-profit company under the nonprofit.

CHAPTERS:

0:00 Intro
0:57 The dot-com bubble
5:20 Y Combinator
9:08 The big picture
13:50 What can go wrong?
18:07 OpenAI
23:10 ChatGPT
26:31 Five days to decide the future
31:20 Artificial general intelligence

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12/13 May 14, 2024
https://t.co/SdPNi0uVzw

[Ilya Sutskever @ilyasut]

After almost a decade, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI.  The company’s trajectory has been nothing short of miraculous, and I’m confident that OpenAI will build AGI that is both safe and beneficial under the leadership of @sama, @gdb, @miramurati and now, under the excellent research leadership of @merettm.  It was an honor and a privilege to have worked together, and I will miss everyone dearly.   So long, and thanks for everything. I am excited for what comes next — a project that is very personally meaningful to me about which I will share details in due time.