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A year ago today, Sam Altman returned to OpenAI after being fired just five days earlier. What really happened in the boardroom? Fable, a game and AI simulation company, built its AI Sim Francisco “war game” to find out why the behind closed doors board fight turned out the way it did.
It feels a bit weird to simulate a real-life event in this way, but Fable CEO Edward Saatchi is interested in whether a different set of decisions could have led to a different outcome for this company at the center of the generative AI revolution.
The simulation pits different board members and personalities against each other in a “multi-agent competition,” where each AI player is trying to come out on top. Here’s the war game research paper being released today that came from this experiment.
The SIM-1 framework for AI decision making is basically a simulation of the five days from when Sam Altman was removed as CEO of OpenAI to when he returned.
“Simulations offer a completely new way to explore AI decision making in rich environments — including in war game situations where predicting possible outcomes can be invaluable,” said Joshua Johnson, CEO of Tree, an AI startup which partnered with Fable on this research paper, said in a statement. “These aren’t simply chatbots. These AIs need to sleep and eat, and to balance many different physical, mental and emotional goals.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman only comes out a winner four out of 20 simulations.
SIM-1, in part using the new reasoning model GPT4o, gives its sense of what happened behind closed doors at OpenAI between Sam and Ilya, the hidden tactics of leading players such as Satya Nadella and Marc Andreessen, and what was said by the leading players as they grappled with an unprecedented crisis in the tech industry.
“It’s interesting to find out just how unlikely it was that Sam did return,” Saatchi said in an interview with GamesBeat. “That’s why people run war games in D …