Turning it into an emergency and surprise coup with innuendo of wrongdoing looks to have been a huge mistake, and may result in total loss of control where a more measured course correction could have succeeded.
I'm curious where the rank & file OpenAI employees stand on this, as it seems to me like they will be the ultimate kingmakers. The Reddit thread on Friday made it seem like they supported Ilya - but for all we know, the anonymous Reddit poster might have been Ilya himself.
Looks like they were right to boot him, but may have done it way too late, having already de facto lost control due to the direction he’d guided the organization. If he comes out on top, it’ll mean the original OpenAI and its mission is dead, looks like to me, and the board was already cut out months ago but didn’t realize it yet.
The problem comes when the situations starts to resemble the line about how, if you owe a bank a billion dollars, you own the bank: if the direction the CEO has taken the company differs enough from the vision of the board, and they've had enough time to develop the company in that direction, they can kinda hold the organization hostage. Yes, the company isn't what the board really wanted it to be, but it's still worth a bajillion dollars: completely unwinding it and starting over is unthinkable, but all the options that include firing the CEO (the only real lever the board has, the foundation of all the decision-making weight that they have, remember) end up looking like that.
The board was naive, to say the least.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/15/23640180/openai-gpt-4-lau...
To push back on this a bit. If two yet unknown people, "an Altman" and "an Ilya", both applied to YC to start a company that builds and sells AI models, guess who would get funded. Not the guy who can't build AI models.
I find it bizarre that the guy who can build is suddenly the villain-nerd who can't be trusted, and the salesman is the hero, in this community.
Sam seems to have a "move fast and break things" approach which would be appropriate for a less critical industry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellig...
"The field of AI research was founded at a workshop held on the campus of Dartmouth College, USA during the summer of 1956."
In reality you need all of them, and they are all separate talents, but things are clearly unbalanced.
Also, the executive who said it wasn’t for malfeasance wasn’t himself on the board and appears to be trying to push for Altman’s return. The board themselves has not yet said there was no malfeasance. To the contrary, they said that Altman had not been completely candid with them, which could very well be the last straw of malfeasance in a pattern of malfeasance which in aggregate reaches a sufficient threshold to justify a firing.
I don’t know whether there was or wasn’t malfeasance, but taking that executive’s word for it seems unwise in this polarized PR war.
This is the most important quote: "We can say definitively that the board’s decision was not made in response to malfeasance or anything related to our financial, business, safety, or security/privacy practices. This was a breakdown in communication between Sam and the board."
If it were a plant by the other camp how would this make it there? Also the whole article sounds like "You don't want him as a CEO? He is going to get sooo much money, and going to out compete you sooo hard. He is already in talks for his new venture." Which is obviously what Sam's side would like to project.
The example he gave is a model that could independently do science.
It does not matter that the board has the legal power to do whatever they want eg fire the CEO. If the investors and key employees that keep the company going walk away, they end up with nothing so they might as well resign and preserve the organization rather than burn the whole thing down.
The board was considering the requests to bring back Sam because they realized they were handling the situation badly and didn’t want the organization to blow up and fail at its mission, but they refused to resign unless and until suitably mission-aligned replacement board members were agreed upon (note that profit is not the nonprofit’s mission).
Of course they didn’t bring him back in the end, or resign, after all.
If the board had yielded to similarly minded replacements and brought back Sam, that isn’t the same as exonerating him, only realizing how badly they handled the firing. I can imagine that an independent investigation into the truth of the existing board’s allegations would still have been ordered by the new board, just as the new interim CEO actually did. If it was truly just a personality clash leading to mistrust, that would probably be the end of it. If there truly was malfeasance that makes Sam and unsuitable CEO, they’d probably then engage a PR firm to help make the case to the world far more persuasively than happened on Friday.
Yes, this is speculation, but I’ve been a nonprofit director and president myself, and if I were on that replacement board it’s what I’d do. In that case, the organization was much lower-profile than OpenAI, and we were spare-time volunteers with a tiny budget. The closest we came to self-dealing is when a long-time director wanted to become a paid software engineer contractor for us, but he left the board in order to make that ethically clear, and the remaining board approved the arrangement. Nothing hidden or dishonest there, and he’s continued to be a great help to the organization.
(Disclaimer: I stopped my own involvement with the org over 4 years ago myself, but that was truly because the rest of my life got too busy. There was no drama or anything around that.)
Let’s assume for a second that it is a power play. If the point of it is just the power struggle between two factions seeking power then yeah it’s not a good thing to majorly disrupt an organization. But if the point of the power play is to rescue the nonprofit’s pursuit of its mission from a CEO’s misuse of power that goes against the mission, it’s a board acting exactly as it should, other than badly handling the communications around this mess.
I have no inside info and therefore am not expressing any opinion on what the truth is. But I’m not going to rush to believe the PR war being waged by Altman and his allies merely because the current board is bad at PR/comms.
I look forward to reading any public summary of the report from the investigation which the new interim CEO has ordered.
https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-staff-walk-protest-sam-al...