zlacker

Does the board not have final control? Why have they agreed (in principle) to step down? I wish more of the reporting around this was specific about who has the power to do what.

>>jmckib+(OP)
If enough employees quit or Microsoft throws some weight around, the enterprise could implode, making board-control moot.

>>jmckib+(OP)
My understanding is that, fundamentally, the only power the board _has_ is to fire the CEO. The CEO, not wanting to be fired, is therefore incentivized to manage the board's expectations, which looks a lot like being willing to take direction from the board if you squint a bit.

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.

>>jmckib+(OP)
My guess is it’s hard to say exactly who has the power and where the power comes from. I bet Sam and his side don’t have any direct power, but their power in the negotiation comes from other sources, like the ability of more Sam loyalists to resign, and Microsoft legal threats which don’t have to be legitimate to be effective since they have such powerful lawyers. So on paper the board has all the power, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to the real world.

>>cwillu+07
If you really believe in the ideology and believe that the continuation of openai is dangerous--shutting down the company completely should be an option you consider

>>Davidz+ud
Oh, absolutely, although you'd have to consider what happens to the tech and the people who developed it: it may be better to have the out-of-control genie at least nominally under your control than not.

>>jmckib+(OP)
Power is a fuzzy thing. You can think about power as being distributed across lots of different entities (the board, CEO, senior execs, investors, rank and file employees, etc) with some having more concentrated power (eg the board) than others (eg individual employees). However, if you create a situation (eg lots of employees decide to walk out in support of the ousted CEO) that can aggregate enough power to overcome any other single entity. That seems to be what is happening here.

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.