zlacker

> The botched firing of Sam Altman proves that fancy governance structures are little more than paper shields against the market.

The things I saw didn't make any sense, so I can't say that it proves anything other than the existence of hidden information.

The board fired him, and they chose a replacement. The replacement sided with Altman. This repeated several times. The board was (reportedly) OK with closing down the entire business on the grounds of their charter.

Why didn't the board do that? And why did their chosen replacements, not individually but all of them in sequence, side with the person they fired?

My only guess is the board was blackmailed. It's just a guess — it's the only thing I can think of that fits the facts, and I'm well aware that this may be a failure of imagination on my part, and want to emphasise that this shouldn't be construed as anything more than a low-confidence guess by someone who has only seen the same news as everyone else.

>>ben_w+(OP)
You obviously have no experience with non-profit governance. OpenAI is organized as a public charity which is required to have an independent board. Due to people leaving the board, they were down to six members, three independent directors plus Sam and two of his employees. They had been struggling to add more board members because Sam and the independent directors couldn't agree on who to add. Then Sam concocted an excuse to remove one of the independent directors and lied to board members about his discussions with other board members.

I think they had no choice at that point but to fire Sam and remove him from the board. When that turned into a shitshow and they faced personal threats, they resigned to let a new board figure out a way out of this mess.

Also, I am not surprised the new board isn't being completely open because they are still probably trying to figure out how to fix their governance problems.

>>baking+XH
> You obviously have no experience with non-profit governance.

Correct!

> I think they had no choice at that point but to fire Sam and remove him from the board. When that turned into a shitshow and they faced personal threats, they resigned to let a new board figure out a way out of this mess.

As someone with no experience with non-profit governance, this does not seem coherent with (1) they didn't just say that, (2) none of their own choices for replacement CEO were willing to go along with this, and this happened with several replacements in a row.

For (1) I'd be willing to just assume good faith on their part, even though it seems odd; but (2) is the one which seems extremely weird to the point that I find myself unable to reconcile.

It would also not be compatible with the reports they were willing to close the company on grounds of it being a danger to humanity, but I'm not sure how reliable that news story was.

>>ben_w+AL
Yes, ideally you would have a succession plan and a statement reviewed by lawyers, but in this case, you had a deadlocked board that suddenly had a majority to act and did so in the moment. If they had waited, they would have probably lost the opportunity because Ilya Sutskever would have switched his vote again. But the end result is that Sam is off the board and that is the important thing.

Maybe you should explain your blackmail theory and we could see which idea makes the most sense.

>>baking+ES
Ok, I'll give it a go.

1. Some party, for some reason, wants to slow down AI development. There are many people motivated to do this. Assume one of them had means and opportunity.

2. The board members wake up to a malicious message ordering them to do ${something} "or ${secret} will be revealed!" (this ${something} could have been many things, so long as it happened to be compatible with firing Altman).

3. The board fires Altman.

4. The board cannot reveal the true reason why they fired Altman, because that would reveal the thing(s) they're being blackmailed over, so they have to make up a different excuse to give to the CEOs they've named as a replacement. As this is done in a hurry under high stress, the story the board arrives at is fundamentally not very good.

5. The replacement CEO does not buy the story given by the board because it's not very well thought-out, and sides with Altman. This repeats a few times.

6. When it becomes clear the board is not capable of winning this battle, because none of the CEOs they hire will carry out their orders, the blackmailer becomes convinced there's no point even trying to hold the board to this threat (there doesn't need to be communication between the board and the blackmailer for this to work, but it's not ruled out either).

While it does seem to fit the observables, I do want to again emphasise that I don't put high probability on this scenario — it's just marginally less improbable than the other ones I've heard, which is a really low bar because none made sense.

>>ben_w+nV1
That's wild. I think we will eventually hear more of the story.

>>baking+2k2
I think we're on the same page. More from the board members specifically is most likely to falsify my hypothesis, as they would be unlikely to speak at all if this is correct; more from the interim CEOs may falsify or be compatible with my hypothesis.