The board may have been incompetent and shortsighted. Perhaps they should even try and bring Altman back, and reform themselves out of existence. But why would the vast majority of the workforce back an open letter failing to signal where they stand on the crucial issue - on the purpose of OpenAI and their collective work? Given the stakes which the AI community likes to claim are at issue in the development of AGI, that strikes me as strange and concerning.
I have no inside information. I don't know anyone at Open AI. This is all purely speculation.
Now that that's out out the way, here is my guess: money.
These people never joined OpenAI to "advance sciences and arts" or to "change the world". They joined OpenAI to earn money. They think they can make more money with Sam Altman in charge.
Once again, this is completely all speculation. I have not spoken to anyone at Open AI or anyone at Microsoft or anyone at all really.
EDIT: I don't know why this is being downvoted. My speculation as to the average OpenAI employee's place in the global income distribution (of course wealth is important too) was not snatched out of thin air. See: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/9/15/23874111/charit...
Not if you think the utterly incompetent board proved itself totally untrustworthy of safe development, while Microsoft as a relatively conservative, staid corporation is seen as ultimately far more trustworthy.
Honestly, of all the big tech companies, Microsoft is probably the safest of all, because it makes its money mostly from predictable large deals with other large corporations to keep the business world running.
It's not associated with privacy concerns the way Google is, with advertisers the way Meta is, or with walled gardens the way Apple is. Its culture these days is mainly about making money in a low-risk, straightforward way through Office and Azure.
And relative to startups, Microsoft is far more predictable and less risky in how it manages things.