zlacker

>>himara+(OP)
It's worth knowing the specific reasons why the board fired Sam before assessing the value of this news. Too much rumor and not enough evidence.

>>d_sem+43
It’s pretty clearly just a power play by four of the board members. Keep in mind Sam was part of the board and Greg Brockman was chairman of the board, so this was 4 board members ousting 2 other board members. OpenAI execs have already said it wasn’t for wrongdoing.

>>skwirl+c9
A majority of the board removing a minority of the board doesn’t seem like a power play to me. If the opposite were somehow achieved, e.g. through persuading one member of the majority to vote against their own interests, and using the chairman’s casting vote, that would be a power play.

Also, the executive who said it wasn’t for malfeasance wasn’t himself on the board and appears to be trying to push for Altman’s return. The board themselves has not yet said there was no malfeasance. To the contrary, they said that Altman had not been completely candid with them, which could very well be the last straw of malfeasance in a pattern of malfeasance which in aggregate reaches a sufficient threshold to justify a firing.

I don’t know whether there was or wasn’t malfeasance, but taking that executive’s word for it seems unwise in this polarized PR war.

>>jkaplo+ez
It is if the board had 9 members originally and only temporarily has 6 because of recent resignations. And that there is a proposal to expand the board on the table (because 6 is kind of thin for a company this size).

>>jacque+vf1
Ah, I didn’t know about the three vacancies. If the former board members in those slots all would have voted against these actions, then yes it probably meets my definition of a power play. But if any of them would have voted to take these actions, then the required majority may have been there even with the former full 9-member board, in which case it’s again not a power play.

Let’s assume for a second that it is a power play. If the point of it is just the power struggle between two factions seeking power then yeah it’s not a good thing to majorly disrupt an organization. But if the point of the power play is to rescue the nonprofit’s pursuit of its mission from a CEO’s misuse of power that goes against the mission, it’s a board acting exactly as it should, other than badly handling the communications around this mess.

I have no inside info and therefore am not expressing any opinion on what the truth is. But I’m not going to rush to believe the PR war being waged by Altman and his allies merely because the current board is bad at PR/comms.

I look forward to reading any public summary of the report from the investigation which the new interim CEO has ordered.