It’s popular in the AI space to claim altruism and openness; OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI (the new Musk one) all have a funky governance structure because they want to be a public good. The challenge is once any of these (or others) start to gain enough traction that they are seen as having a good chance at reaping billions in profits things change.
And it’s not just AI companies and this isn’t new. This is art of human nature and will always be.
We should be putting more emphasis and attention on truly open AI models (open training data, training source code & hyperparameters, model source code, weights) so the benefits of AI accrue to the public and not just a few companies.
[edit - eliminated specific company mentions]
Whatever has been written can be unwritten and if that fails, just start a new company with the same employees.
The things I saw didn't make any sense, so I can't say that it proves anything other than the existence of hidden information.
The board fired him, and they chose a replacement. The replacement sided with Altman. This repeated several times. The board was (reportedly) OK with closing down the entire business on the grounds of their charter.
Why didn't the board do that? And why did their chosen replacements, not individually but all of them in sequence, side with the person they fired?
My only guess is the board was blackmailed. It's just a guess — it's the only thing I can think of that fits the facts, and I'm well aware that this may be a failure of imagination on my part, and want to emphasise that this shouldn't be construed as anything more than a low-confidence guess by someone who has only seen the same news as everyone else.