Normal stage

MindMatters notes a splitup in Satan Altman’s company. Several top execs are leaving all at once.

There’s no point in speculating about the detailed reasons for the split, which is a typical stage in a fast-growing company with a fanatical founder. At some point the fanatical founder needs to PURIFY his execs, and the less fanatical ones leave.

Similar splits happened in the early stages of Ford and GM. The Dodge Brothers had been making most of the Model T, and they scrammed when Henry decided to “vertically integrate”. Walter Chrysler and Charles Nash had been at the top of GM, and got disgusted with Billy Durant’s extravagant endless acquisition at a time when he should have been settling down and concentrating on the products.

All three of those disgruntled execs founded cautious slow-moving non-extravagant companies, which DIDN’T suffer from early splitups.

What’s interesting in OpenAI is the constants, not the variables.

All of these people are stark raving mad.

The splitters and the stayers are equally loony. All are firmly convinced that AI is an inevitable force like the motions of the stars. All are firmly convinced that AI is the endpoint of an inevitable vector away from messy physical life into totally abstract mathematically pure nonlife. This vector toward annihilation has been the central creed of the California tech cult since the early 60s.

The execs may disagree on the exact corporate structures needed to reach the goal of total obliteration, but they all want the same thing.