zlacker

>>medler+(OP)
This makes sense. The board thinks they're calling the shots, but the reality is the people with the money are the ones calling the shots, always. Boards are just appointed by shareholders aka investors aka capital holders to do their bidding.

The capped-profit / non-profit structure muddles that a little bit, but the reality is that entity can't survive without the funding that goes into the for-profit piece

And if current investors + would-be investors threaten to walk away, what can the board really do? They have no leverage.

Sounds like they really didn't "play the tape forward" and think this through...

>>airstr+r3
A non profit board absolutely calls the shots at a non profit, in so far as the CEO and their employment goes. Non profit boards are not beholden, structurally, to investors and there are no shareholders.

No stakeholder would walk away from OpenAI for want of sam Altman. They don’t license OpenAI technology or provide funding for his contribution. They do it to get access to GPT4. There is no comparable competitor available.

If anything they would be miffed about how it was handled, but to be frank, unless GPT4 is sam Altman furiously typing, I don’t know he’s that important. The instability caused by the suddenness, that’s different.

>>fnordp+f7
This is not just a "non-profit"... it's a non-profit that owns a $90B for-profit company developing revolutionary, once-in-a-century technology. There is a LOT of money at play here.

Others have commented on how Microsoft actually has access to the IP, so the odds that they could pack their toys and rebuild OpenAI 2.0 somewhere else with what they've learned, their near infinite capital and not have to deal with the non-profit shenanigans are meaningful.

I'm not saying Sam is needed to make OpenAI what it is, but he's definitely "the investors' guy" in the organization, based on what has surfaced over the last 24 hours. Those investors would rather have him there over someone else, hence the pressure to put him back. It doesn't matter whether you and I think he's the man for the job -- what matters is whether investors think they are.

TL;DR the board thinks they have leverage, but as it turns out, they don't