> Alongside rifts over strategy, board members also contended with Altman’s entrepreneurial ambitions. Altman has been looking to raise tens of billions of dollars from Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds to create an AI chip startup to compete with processors made by Nvidia Corp., according to a person with knowledge of the investment proposal. Altman was courting SoftBank Group Corp. chairman Masayoshi Son for a multibillion-dollar investment in a new company to make AI-oriented hardware in partnership with former Apple designer Jony Ive. Sutskever and his allies on the OpenAI board chafed at Altman’s efforts to raise funds off of OpenAI’s name, and they harbored concerns that the new businesses might not share the same governance model as OpenAI, the person said.
You can't argue that the company has not been impressively run and not just because of the quality of the models.
At the end of the day he is responsible for building a $100b business, with a product users love, that has attracted developers in droves and built a highly successful partnership with Microsoft.
And pretty sure the direction of the company is what the issue was. Not any side projects.