They started as a non-profit ffs.
Either there’s more to it or the board is staffed by very naive people.
My question is: what was stopping both parties here from pursuing parallel paths? — have the non-profit/research oriented arm continue to focus on solving AGI, backed by the funds raised on from their LLM offerings? Were potential roadmaps really that divergent?
I had always assumed this was their internal understanding up until now, since at least the introduction of ChatGPT subscriptions.
A fundamental inability to align on what, on a fundamental level, the mission set out in the charter of a 501(c)(3) charity means in real world terms is not "a simple strategy disagreement"; moreover, the existence of a factional dispute over that doesn't mean that there weren't serious specific conduct that occurred in the context of that dispute over goals.
You do if part of the way that they attempted to win the internal power struggle resulting from the disagreemtn was lying to the board to avoid having their actions which lacked majority support from being thwarted.