"In a post to X Friday evening, Mr. Brockman said that he and Mr. Altman had no warning of the board’s decision. “Sam and I are shocked and saddened by what the board did today,” he wrote. “We too are still trying to figure out exactly what happened.”
Mr. Altman was asked to join a video meeting with the board at noon on Friday and was immediately fired, according to Mr. Brockman. Mr. Brockman said that even though he was the chairman of the board, he was not part of this board meeting.
He said that the board informed him of Mr. Altman’s ouster minutes later. Around the same time, the board published a blog post."
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/17/technology/openai-sam-alt...
[1] - https://sfstandard.com/2023/11/17/openai-sam-altman-firing-b...
One of the board of directors that fired him co-signed these AI principles (https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/ai-principles/) that are very much in line with safeguarding general intelligence
Another of them wrote this article (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/illusion-chinas-ai-prow...) in June of this year that opens by quoting Sam Altman saying US regulation will "slow down American industry in such a way that China or somebody else makes faster progress” and basically debunks that stance...and quite well, I might add.
There's far more to the world than China on top of that and importantly developments happen both inside and outside of the scope of regulatory oversight (usually only heavily commercialized products face scrutiny) and China itself will eventually catch up to the average - progress is rarely a non-stop hockey stick, it plateaus. LLMs might already be hitting a wall https://twitter.com/HamelHusain/status/1725655686913392933)
The Chinese are experts at copying and stealing Western tech. They don't have to be on the frontier to catch up to a crippled US and then continue development at a faster pace, and as we've seen repeatedly in history regulations stick around for decades after their utility has long past. They are not levers that go up and down, they go in one direction and maybe after many many years of damage they might be adjusted, but usually after 10 starts/stops and half-baked non-solutions papered on as real solutions - if at all.
Sure that's been their modus operandi in the past, but to hold an opinion that a billion humans on the other side of the Pacific are only capable of copying and no innovation of their own is a rather strange generalization for a thread on general intelligence.