From the Daring Fireball post:
About 700 OpenAI employees, out of a total of 770 …
There are 770 OpenAI employees!?
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Not any more, it seems.
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It appears this is solely due to four OpenAI board members. One of which, Ilya Sutskever, who joined the rest of the employees and the temporary CEO, and signed the letter calling for the remaining three board members resignation.
Now that the Hollywood writer’s strike is over I’m sure there are several people working on a movie script about this.
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Will it open with a Bluescreen? 
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They won’t use talk writers, instead just have a conversation with ChatGPT.
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Soooo, with all of these apps having Black Friday sales with OpenAI as a feature, is it best to hold off on buying at this time, as they could be kapoot tomorrow?
The lead roles will be played by AI-generated instances of the Marx Brothers, with the Three Stooges playing the OpenAI board. Pies-in-the-face all around. 
Katie
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There’s a twitter thread posted with an open letter from ex-employees. Paints a very different picture of Sam Altman as the villain and the board and co-founder that pushed him out as the hero.
Accuses Sam of both HR and corporate evil deeds.
At this point, I don’t know who to cheer for and wish the Apple TV+ docudrama was already streaming (that’ satire - I have no idea if anyone will make this story into a movie like the WeWork saga.)
I don’t know how much weight an unsigned letter supposedly leaked by Elon Musk will have. But this part confuses me:
“As you have now witnessed what happens when you dare stand up to Sam Altman, perhaps you can understand why so many of us have remained silent for fear of repercussions. “.
This can’t be the 700+ employees who were guaranteed a job at the second largest company in the world if OpenAI had imploded. So who are they?
I’m not taking sides, but an interesting assessment:
It is all ironic that people don’t realize Musk & Co. funded/started OpenAI as a non-profit seeking to build AGI (artificial general AI), but pivoted to LLM tool (ChatGPT) when they studied Google’s research paper on the invention of the transformer model (the “T” in GPT).
There isn’t really any secret-sauce proprietary magic in LLM/GPT’s. That’s why Google Bard, Meta’s tool, and a few others (Apple?) are also available or being developed.
The only crucial element to LLM development is access to huge computer power to crank through all the training data and run the model for customers/users.
That’s why Sam “sold out” to Microsoft by shifting OpenAI to a commercial business model (through complicated corporate governance and financial changes).
A lot is written about Microsoft investing $13B in OpenAI. Very little is written that the investment was $1B in money, and $12B in “credits” for Azure (Microsoft’s cloud computing data center) processing.
One can assume that is $12B in retail credits, not actual Microsoft costs. Microsoft also got all the source code and rights to the IP for their investment, a really smart move by MS.
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Excelent execution by MS here, stealing the thunder from Google while they were figuring out how to deploy the tech without jeopardizing their search business.
My takeaway from all this bruhaha is that we saw the “for profit” faction headed by Altman win the battle against a more conservative board.
Interesting, more dirty laundry about Sam’s background starting to be published. Certainly WaPo is a bit more reliable than anonymous sources?
Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor - The Washington Post
Absolutely, an anonymous source has no credibility at all. The broad strokes of the WaPo story could describe a great many people in history. Some succeeded, some flamed out, and some ended up in prison or worse. A couple founded two of the most valuable companies in the world.
Seven hundred people that work with Altman, a number of investors, and the head of a very large corporation seem to think he has a good chance to be successful. I have no idea if they are correct or not.
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Here in Silicon Valley I have some first-hand experience working for a range of personality-driven CEO/founders.
The only thing I will attest is that nice guys don’t always finish last, and some jerks, even CEO or Chairman of the Board, even though they seemed to have great public persona and widespread support, do go down in flames (and jail) for putting making money their only priority.
It is a shame wall street and the public value results at any cost sometimes a bit too much.
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Hopefully not any cost but I know what you mean. The corporation I worked for decades ago had a real a*hole for a CEO but he delivered results which put him on the covers of Fortune and Forbes.