zlacker

It’s pretty clearly just a power play by four of the board members. Keep in mind Sam was part of the board and Greg Brockman was chairman of the board, so this was 4 board members ousting 2 other board members. OpenAI execs have already said it wasn’t for wrongdoing.

>>skwirl+(OP)
A majority of the board removing a minority of the board doesn’t seem like a power play to me. If the opposite were somehow achieved, e.g. through persuading one member of the majority to vote against their own interests, and using the chairman’s casting vote, that would be a power play.

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.

>>jkaplo+2q
You’re saying the board is trying to bring back an employee they know committed malfeasance?

>>skwirl+(OP)
And the board just shrunk because of resignations and they wouldn't have had a majority in the past. It may have been one of those 'now or never' things.

>>jkaplo+2q
It is if the board had 9 members originally and only temporarily has 6 because of recent resignations. And that there is a proposal to expand the board on the table (because 6 is kind of thin for a company this size).

>>peyton+cH
I’m not saying that. I think the main people pushing for that were Altman-aligned members of the management, staff, and investor populations, not the board.

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.)

>>jacque+j61
Ah, I didn’t know about the three vacancies. If the former board members in those slots all would have voted against these actions, then yes it probably meets my definition of a power play. But if any of them would have voted to take these actions, then the required majority may have been there even with the former full 9-member board, in which case it’s again not a power play.

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.

>>jkaplo+2q
I think this is a poor reading of the situation that is aging badly.

https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028

https://www.wired.com/story/openai-staff-walk-protest-sam-al...