zlacker

>>himara+(OP)
From the article: "...but Microsoft hasn’t decided whether it wants board representation..."

This is not a good sign. Microsoft the largest $10Bn investor, who is in the middle of pushing through the restructuring of the company, hasn't decided if they want board representation? The only reason you would do that if they want to keep their options open, in the future, to hit OpenAI hard (legally and/or to raid the personnel).

Board representation would come with a fiduciary responsibility and it looks like they may not want that. I could only imagine the intensity of Microsoft senior engineers screaming that they could replicate all of this in-house (not saying whether it's justified or not).

>>g42gre+wu
Everyone keeps saying that Microsoft made a huge mistake by not having board representation, and I couldn't disagree more.

Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI was really ideal from a speed-of-advancement perspective. That is, reams and reams have been written about how Google has to move at such a slow pace with AI productization because, essentially, they have so much to lose. Microsoft saw this first hand with their infamous Tay AI bot, which turned into a racist Hitler lover in a day.

Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI was perfect - they could realistically be seen as separate entities, and they let OpenAI take all the risk of misaligned AI, and then only pull in AI into their core services as they were comfortable. Google's lack of this sort of relationship is a direct hindrance to their speed in AI advancement and productization. Microsoft's lack of a board seat gives them a degree of "plausible deniability" if you will.

Plus, it's not like Microsoft's lack of a board seat impacts their influence that much. Basically everyone believes that the push to get Altman back has Microsoft's/Nadella's fingerprints all over it. Their billions give them plenty of leverage, and my bet going forward is that even if they don't take a board seat outright, they will demand that board membership be composed of more "professional", higher caliber board members that will likely align with them anyway.

>>hn_thr+KD
Exactly this. This incident has proven MSFT’s strong hands without a board seat and they don’t really need it if things do/did go off the rails.

>>shivaw+HG
Isn’t the point that if MSFT had a board seat, this whole problem likely wouldn’t have happened in the first place?

>>stingr+4J
Not necessarily. They still would have needed to have a majority of board seats on their side - I mean, Brockman was chairman of the board and he didn't find out about all this until the machinations were complete.

Read a good a article about the history of the OpenAI board that argued this all went down due to the recent loss of 3 board members, bringing total board membership from 9 to 6 (including losses like Reid Hoffman, who never would have voted for something like this), and Altman wanted to increase board membership again. Likely the "Gang of Four" here saw this as their slim window to change the direction of OpenAI.