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.
Maybe because the alternative is being led by lunatics who think like this:
You also informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed “would be consistent with the mission.”
to which the only possible reaction is
What
The
Fuck?
That right there is what happens when you let "AI ethics" people get control of something. Why would anyone work for people who believe that OpenAI's mission is consistent with self-destruction? This is a comic book super-villain style of "ethics", one in which you conclude the village had to be destroyed in order to save it.
If you are a normal person, you want to work for people who think that your daily office output is actually pretty cool, not something that's going to destroy the world. A lot of people have asked what Altman was doing there and why people there are so loyal to him. It's obvious now that Altman's primary role at OpenAI was to be a normal leader that isn't in the grip of the EA Basilisk cult.