Top stories today:

1. 90% of OpenAI employees demand board to resign
2. X sues Media Matters for alleged smear that scared sponsors
3. Microsoft open sources Orca 2, small (7B, 13B) Llama 2 fork
4. Zoom’s revenue +3% to $1.14B

0. Data and calendar

1. 700 out of 770 OpenAI employees, including Ilya Sutskever, sign letter demanding board to resign

Ilya earlier apologized for having voted for Altman’s firing, prompting Elon to ask questions

Ilya told employees the firing was not motivated by AI safety reasons

Weird explanations given by Ilya: “One explanation was that Altman was said to have given two people at OpenAI the same project. The other was that Altman allegedly gave two board members different opinions about a member of personnel.”

Prediction markets are not too sure:

• 45% odds of Sam Altman returning: Manifold Markets.

• Ilya flipped after Greg Brockman’s wife Anna cried and pleaded.

• “Intense discussions” to unify staff: company memo sent late Mon.

• Anthropic was approached about merger, CEO offer.

  • Former GitHub CEO, Scale AI founder declined CEO role.

• Thrive, Khosla, Tiger continue to push for Altman’s return.

  • Even Microsoft CEO Nadella is OK with Altman returning.

  • Lawsuit being considered.

• Salesforce’s Benioff offers OpenAI staff to match pay.

• Eight Sleep data shows +27% SF residents getting <5h of sleep.

• Vinod Khosla criticizes board’s “religion of ‘effective altruism.’”

Our view: this episode shows how OpenAI’s dominance is not as strong as those of monopolies like Google Search

• We wouldn’t expect this panic if some top Google Search leaders left to start their own search engines. In fact, some have tried.

• Google Search’s tech advantage is a result of decades of development and of mixing great search models (text, images, maps, snippets, etc.).

3. X sues Media Matters for alleged smear that caused advertisers to flee