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The primary motivation behind promising such an "investigation" is an attempt at employee retention by addressing one of OpenAI employee's key concerns, the abrupt, opaque and, frankly bizarre, behavior of the outside board members. We know it's a key employee concern because OpenAI's COO said so in his all-hands email to employees on Friday. This was confirmed in spades by the subsequent open letter to the board signed by over 600 (out of ~770) employees.

At this point we still have no idea what the outside board director's issue might have been but the fact that even their initial internal allies, co-founder/board member Ilya, CTO/interim CEO Mira and the COO, all stopped supporting the three outside directors after engaging directly with them over the weekend is pretty damning. Unfortunately, the scope, conduct and results of any such investigation are all entirely under the control of the three outside board members. The same outside directors that abruptly fired the last interim CEO and the CEO before her in a period of 48 hours. Unlike most boards, they aren't accountable to shareholders, investors, employees or anyone else.