Big money on the line. Insane, life-changing payouts in the cards. Altman and MS on the side of those, the board on the side of the mission. Money’s likely to win.
This claim on the press had zero substance. It could well be, but there were no wide resignations or anything. Just 4 execs.
OTOH, Altman going for the high score could bump employee TCO 10x. So who knows. Passion vs greed.
In a city where a normal person cannot buy a house and employer wants 25% office time? Give me a break, they just want to live like people could in 1950s.
That said, not clear to me that board is supported by the staff.
So if Sam goes, and many of the key staff go... will be interesting.
And the boards style in all this, if that is the "mission" - is wild. You have partners, staff, businesses - doing a VC round and you blow it all up without it sounds like even talking to your board president? Normally this type of ouster requires a properly noticed meeting!
What's there to be passionate about in a doomed business? Where is OpenAI going to get compute from? What work are they going to get done if everybody else follows Altman?
The board didn't plan or think this through at all.
This isn't about Sam being powerful, just about him being a reasonable predictable cofounder Microsoft can work with. It's the rest of the board that shocked Microsoft with how unprofessional their actions were, that they can't be worked with.
The very idea that they would fire Sam without even consulting with Microsoft first is such a gigantic red flag in judgment.
For a for-profit, the pragmatic approach due to Microsoft also being the majority computer provider (We can set aside the investments for the moment - most are in the form of compute credits and come in tranches. OpenAI is not sitting on $10B in cash in their bank accounts or whatever) would make a lot of sense.
But they're a non-profit that operate in accordance to their pipe-dream charter. You and I might be skeptical of it or just think it's generally dumb, but non-profits are allowed to believe in pipe-dreams and pursue them.
At the very least they still issued a poorly worded statement and have not been able to recover from that, but it is quite possible that their attitude towards the investors in the for-profit is entirely consistent with the charter they are supposed to be following.