What remains to be seen is just how closely the board holds the charter to their hearts and whether the governance structure that was built is strong enough to withstand this.
At a minimum, taking your largest supplier and customer for a ride is probably a bad idea.
But non-profits aren't a regular business and their ultimate obligation is to their charter. Depending on just what the level of misalignment was here, it's possible that the company becoming nonviable due to terminating Altman is serving the charter more closely than keeping him on board.
No one posting here has enough detail to really understand what is going on, but we do know the structure of OpenAI and the operating agreement for the for-profit LLC make it a mistake to view the company from the lens as we would a regular for-profit company.
Never been a fan of the “you can’t complain about any bad outcome you agreed could happen” argument.
But if you sign an agreement saying you understand you should treat your investments more like donations and that everything is secondary to the goals of the non-profit and then are upset that your goals were not placed in higher priority than the charter of the non-profit, I'm going to reserve the right to think you're a hypocrite.
In any lens if microsoft pulls their GPUs and funding, then OpenAI is through.
No, pissing microsoft off in this situation is not a good idea. Because microsoft can shut the whole organization down.
Microsoft nor anyone else said they deeply believed in and prioritized OpenAI’s charter over their own interests. They might have agreed to it, and they must abide by agreements, but this is not a case of claiming one set of principles while acting contrary to them.
Given the complex org structure - I wouldn’t be surprised if the non-profit (or at least it’s board) wasn’t fully aware of the contract terms/implications.