Take Me Down to the "Amateur City"
My god, it's full of quotes. Between the testimony and all the discovery in the Elon Musk vs. OpenAI trial, as you might expect, there are a lot of juicy tidbits. But the direct quotes are truly impressive. So far, my favorite has to be Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, on the witness stand, giving his assessment of the OpenAI board when they decided to remove Sam Altman as CEO (aka "The Blip"): "It was amateur city as far as I’m concerned."
Not amateur hour, mind you.1 That would be just a brief moment in time. This was a whole metropolis of amateurs running amok. Mucking up Microsoft's investment.
To me, it's sort of a perfect encapsulation of the situation and it perhaps speaks to the broader one in Silicon Valley. Because these startups are now valued at billions, or tens of billions, or hundreds of billions – or even potentially trillions – there's an assumption from the outside looking in that these are well-oiled machines of industry being run by professionals that themselves are execution machines.
Yeah, no. That's not how it works. Anyone who has lived and/or worked in that world knows this all too well, but this trial is exposing such sausage to all.
It is, indeed, amateur city.
Not across the board, of course. Certainly the mature companies often do run like well-oiled machines that keep printing profits even if and when hiccups occur. Just look at all of Big Tech for examples of that. Apple flubs AI to start? No matter, the iPhone will just keep selling. Google too? All good, their myriad other businesses will quite literally buy them time. Amazon needs longer to get Alexa+ fully baked? You're going to keep shopping and businesses will keep using AWS. Meta quite literally can't buy a hit any longer? No matter, the ads will just keep being served. Even Microsoft itself keeps switching Copilots trying to find one to steer the AI business. But it doesn't matter to the actual top and bottom line. At least not so far.
But startups are a different beast, of course. They're most often going to be immature from both a company and leadership perspective. That's not necessarily a knock on the individuals – though sometimes it is! – it's just the nature of the business. Again, such imperfections can be masked by the massive valuations placed on the companies by investors. And in the Age of AI, such numbers not only can surpass those of actually mature companies, they often dwarf them. This again leads to a natural assumption that they're more mature than they actually are.
The truth is that it's hard to grow up in a period of intense growth, as paradoxical as that may sound. Because everything is moving so fast and constantly evolving, it's unrealistic, if not impossible, for a company's roots to take hold. Anything that appears settled can be uprooted at any moment. Experience helps, and perhaps matters most when it comes to a company maturing faster. But clearly OpenAI was growing at such an unprecedented rate that immaturity ruled the day and the company.
That all came to a head in "The Blip". And it clearly wasn't just the OpenAI board, as Nadella is suggesting. As the texting, emails, testimony, and um, journal entries, make clear, everyone was operating on the fly. From Sam Altman to Greg Brockman to Ilya Sutskever to Mira Murati and seemingly everyone else on down – and up, to the board. (And yes, the whole non-profit element probably didn't help matters here!) Honestly, even the exchanges within Microsoft in the early days of their partnership with OpenAI betray a fairly humorous lack of understanding of what they were all dealing with – though yes, with at least a bit more corporate maturity!
And even Elon Musk, an entrepreneur with perhaps more experience than anyone when it comes to starting and running companies, was clearly bowled over by the immaturity of the operation. And yes, that included some of his own immaturity. Perhaps a lot.
In a way, this trial brings to mind my favorite part of Steve Jobs' famous 2005 Stanford commencement speech: "Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you."
Now, "smarter" is perhaps too loaded a term when it comes to AI given both the nature of the technology and the expertise required to build it. But as with all things in life, there are trade-offs.2 Jobs' point was simply that everything out there that you see and read about and perhaps admire is not built by infallible gods, but by people. Individuals full of flaws with hampers full of dirty laundry. And this trial highlights that.
People can be immature. People can be insecure. People can be jealous. People can be deceptive. People can be messy. People can be complicated. And it's people that start and run companies. At least until the AI gets good enough.
So yeah, OpenAI was "amateur city" – as are most startups. The difference is that most startups haven't historically been given billions upon billions of dollars with the assumption that such money would instantly make them more professional. It doesn't work that way. At least not at first. Such things take time, and mistakes, and headaches.3
In that way, it is Microsoft who may have actually misread the situation. And while it's hard to argue with the result of their investment – at least on paper – there are other results of that partnership that they've clearly grown less keen about and have moved to distance themselves from, professionally.
Let's end with another Nadella quote, this one from an internal note to his executive team in 2022 ahead of a fresh $10B investment into OpenAI – their last major one: "I don’t want to be IBM and OpenAI to be Microsoft."
Spoken like a mature company and leader operating in a professional city...
One more thing: the other thought that immediately popped into my head upon reading Nadella's quote was actually a song. Quite naturally, Guns N' Roses' 1987 "Paradise City". Did you know it was written while the band was together on a tour bus back from... the Bay Area? Fun lyrics too:
Rags and riches, or so they say, you gotta
Keep pushing for the fortune and fame
You know it's all a gamble when it's just a game
You treat it like a capital crime
Everybody's doing their time
1 Though yes, my best guess would be that Nadella slightly flubbed the common phrase – to the point where many stories misquoted him assuming he had said that version and not actually "amateur city" which both AI and a web search will tell you is best known as a "seminal lesbian mystery novel by Katherine V. Forrest" published in 1984. I'm going to assume that's not what Nadella was referring to... ↩
2 My own belief remains that "smarts" matters less than determination with startups. Which I know sounds like a "winning thing" to say, but I actually think it often goes quite dark. Those willing to be the most ruthless in business often win. You have to be okay with being ruthless, which many are not... But many are smart. That's not enough. ↩
3 It's honestly sort of surprising that the company not only hasn't come apart during the endless turmoil, but has thrived. Perhaps that just speaks to the opportunity here... ↩