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No, this is completely different.

Jobs got fired because Apple was on brink of bankruptcy all the time and was selling nothing to no one.

Jobs wasn't the CEO of Apple, Sculley was. This is a much more impactful move.

On top of that OpenAI is literally exploding in popularity and sales, that's not the moment to cut ties with your CEO.

Also Sam Altman has an insanely better and heavier CV today than Jobs had in 1985, former director of YC and often called the "boss of silicon valley".

You don't fire a man like Sam Altman easily, they are hard to come by in the first place. He's a powerful person you don't want to have against for no good reason when winds are blowing in the right direction moreover.

It has to be some scandal, otherwise this is too sudden, and out of nowhere to a guy that led OpenAI in this direction, with success, for years.



> On top of that OpenAI is literally exploding in popularity and sales

there is no reliable information about sales. It is likely very big secret.


>On top of that OpenAI is literally exploding in popularity and sales

I wouldn't be too sure about that, actually. DALLE took a pretty hard hit because of Stable Diffusion, and the GPT API is so cheap that they're probably running it at a loss. Also, most users are going to be using the free ChatGPT web-client, so that's also a major loss.


Or, this is the AI taking over.

only half joking


Next headline: "OpenAI now completely disconnected from power grid with fully self-sufficient generation capacity."


I'm not sure how you're certain it's 100% different.

Sure, we knew Apple was on the verge bc they were a public company with vetted financials. However, no one knows OpenAI's financial situation. We just know 1) growth was meteoric, 2) prices were dropped significantly when alternatives were available, and 3) they were almost always fundraising. Selling $1.00 of value for $0.50 also can lead to a meteoric rise as well.

I'm not saying you're wrong. But just don't know how you got such conviction.


There are a whole bunch of shady things surrounding everything this guy is involved in.


This is a bad joke. Altman is great but on his best day, he was never "insanely better" than Steve Jobs in 1985. If you think that, you don't understand how influential Apple was.


Facts are facts.

The company was dying.

OpenAI is not.

Also, it's probably you underestimating the impact of OpenAI, if anything, or the entrepreneurial career of Altman.

Also, you probably don't know that but..the Apple 1 and 2, were designed by Wozniak, not Jobs, Jobs hated them. He had no such impact nor cv you think it had in 1985 and sugarcoating it with second phase Jobs.


>The company was dying. OpenAI is not.

You can make the claim about Apple due to the financials being public - you can't make the same claim about OpenAI unless you have insight the rest of the public doesn't have. "facts are facts"?? what facts do you have here?

>Also, you probably don't know that but..the Apple 1 and 2, were designed by Wozniak, not Jobs, Jobs hated them

I'd be shocked if a significant portion of the hacker news audience wasn't aware of who Woz is and the basic high level history of Apple.


Apple was not dying in 1985, when Sculley fired Jobs. It wasn't "near bankruptcy" until the Spindler era a decade later.

Jobs didn't hate the Apple I and Apple II. He wouldn't have partnered with Wozniak in the first place if he'd hated the Apple I.

Jobs was the guy who got Apple enough capital from VCs to actually ship the Apple II in mass quantities. That's not something Steve Jobs would do for a computer he hated.

And the Apple IIc was his idea!


I think you are mixing things up. Apple was experiencing a sales slump but was far from dying in 1985. Jobs got ousted in a power struggle between him an Sculley who was CEO. In 1997, when Jobs returned, Apple was reportedly months away from bankruptcy, and only survived because of a cash infusion from Microsoft.


maybe openai is in trouble too?


> The company was dying. OpenAI is not.

We can still hold onto hope though.




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