No one knows why the board did this. No one is talking about that part. Yet every one is on twitter talking shit about the situation.
I have worked with a lot of PhD's and some of them can be, "disconnected" from anything that isn't their research.
This looks a lot like that, disconnected from what average people would do, almost childlike (not ish, like).
Maybe this isn't the group of people who should be responsible for "alignment".
Any reason good enough to fire him is good enough to share with the interim CEO and the rest of the company, if not the entire world. If they can’t even do that much, you can’t blame employees for losing faith in their leadership. They couldn’t even tell SAM ALTMAN why, and he was the one getting fired!
The fact that Altman and Brockman were hired so quickly by Microsoft gives a clue: it takes time to hire someone. For one thing, they need time to decide. These guys were hired by Microsoft between close-of-business on Friday and start-of-business on Monday.
My supposition is that this hiring was in the pipeline a few weeks ago. The board of OpenAI found out on Thursday, and went ballistic, understandably (lack of candidness). My guess is there's more shenanigans to uncover - I suspect that Altman gave Microsoft an offer they couldn't refuse, and that OpenAI was already screwed by Thursday. So realizing that OpenAI was done for, they figured "we might as well blow it all up".
This is not an interview process for hiring a junior dev at FAANG.
If you're Sam & Greg, and Satya gives you an offer to run your own operation with essentially unlimited funding and the ability to bring over your team, then you can decide immediately. There is no real lower bound of how fast it could happen.
Why would they have been able to decide so quickly? Probably because they prioritize the ability to bring over the entire team as fast as possible, and even though they could raise a lot of money in a new company, that still takes time, and they view it as critically important to hire over the new team as fast as possible (within days) that they accept whatever downsides there may be to being a subsidiary of Microsoft.
This is what happens when principles see opportunity and are unencumbered by bureaucratic checks. They can move very fast.
That is, I think Greg and Sam were likely fired because, in the board's view, they were already running OpenAI Global LLC more as if it were a for-profit subsidiary of Microsoft driven by Microsoft's commercial interest, than as the organization able to earn and return profit but focussed on the mission of the nonprofit it was publicly declared to be and that the board very much intended it to be. And, apparently, in Microsoft's view, they were very good at that, so putting them in a role overtly exactly like that is a no-brainer.
And while it usually takes a while to vet and hire someone for a position like that, it doesn't if you've been working for them closely in something that is functionally (from your perspective, if not on paper for the entity they nominally reported to) a near-identical role to the one you are hiring them for, and the only reason they are no longer in that role is because they were doing exactly what you want them to do for you.
It takes time if you're a normal employee under standard operating procedure. If you really want to you can merge two of the largest financial institutions in the world in less than a week. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Credit_Suisse_b...
I don't know anything about how executives get hired. But supposedly this all happened between Friday night and Monday morning. This isn't a simple situation; surely one man working through the weekend can't decide to set up a new division, and appoint two poached executives to head it up, without consulting lawyers and other colleagues. I mean, surely they'd need to go into Altman and Brockman's contracts with OpenAI, to check that the hiring is even legal?
That's why I think this has been brewing for at least a week.
To entertain your theory, Let’s say they were planning on hiring him prior to that firing. If that was the case, why is everybody so upset that Sam got fired, and why is he working so hard to try to get reinstated to a role that he was about to leave anyway?
There may be drawbacks to the "instant hiring" model.