So altman is a big tree. What he brings to the table is the wood it's made of? I'll have a think on that.

This might be too drawn out but you should not consider leaders as the tip of the tree but the roots & trunk.

You can have the best leaves and branches but without good roots & trunk, it's pointless.

From everything I can tell, Altman is essentially an uber-leader. He is great at consolidating & acting on internal information, he's great at externalizing information & bringing in resources, he's great at rallying & exciting his collegues towards a mission. If a leader can have one of those, they are a good leader but to have all of them in one makes them world class.

That's also discounting his reputation and connections as well. Altman is a very valuable person to have on staff if only as a figurehead to parade around and use for introductions. It's like if you had Linus Torvalds, Guido van Rossum, or any other tech superstar on staff. They are valuable as contributors but additionally valuable as people magnets.

You are close - it isn’t that a good leader is the wood, a good leader is the table itself. Don’t know if Sam is or isn’t, but I’ve worked with good leaders like this before, and bad ones who aren’t capable of being this.

Let’s see how many actually quit. Saying “I will quit” is not nearly the same as actually handing in your notice. How many people who threatened to move to Canada after the 2016 election did?

The context here is somewhat different, given that Microsoft are essentially offering to roll out the red carpet for them.

Being funded by Microsoft is one thing, but working for them might lead to some dissonance -- I think tech ppl are already wary of them owning GitHub... and then owning the team building AGI.

It would and should give ppl pause. I suspect Sam is just inside Microsoft for the bluff. He couldn't operate in the way he wants -- "trust me, I have humanity's best interests at heart" -- while so close to them, I don't think

If they aren't quitting, they are moving to Microsoft with Sam I'd imagine.

That... is called quitting...

If they follow Sam to Microsoft the team might be basically the same and able to work on the same projects. But yes, they would be quitting one company and going to another.