this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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This entire thing is super confusing… and, I might have missed a lot of things, but it kinda seems to be the board was right? They seemed inexperienced, but they still seemed to be capable of working in the best interest of the company’s vision (and doing so).
Anyway, please fill me in if I’ve missed something crucial.
How in any of this does the board seem to have been right?
This is lemmy so people are going to side with the non-profit side of things here
The best I can understand of the situation is that Sam and lots of the rest of the employees were generally trying to move toward a for-profit model. The board didn’t like this and fired him which is within their power. So if you don’t like a for-profit Open AI then you’ll generally side with the board on this one. (Part of the boards “job” is ensuring that AGI is developed for the benefit of all of humanity. This isn’t an exaggeration it’s literally outlined in their list of duties)
If you only look at how wishy washy the board has been then they look like big dumb dumbs. But given how many employees walked out they had no choice but to try and get him back. At this point many people are expecting the board to resign in full and a new board to be instated but we’ll just have to wait and see
Sam Altman was already CEO of the for-profit arm of OpenAI. The non-profit arm, OpenAI, Inc. had a controlling 51% of shares. So I’m not sure what you mean when you say:
They were already a for-profit company. What we saw this week is that the non-profit board may have had a 51% controlling share in the stock, but that’s the only control they had, and it was totally on paper. Without the employees of their for-profit arm, and apparently without Altman, the non-profit arm has exactly jack shit, as the entire world now plainly sees.
It was an ethics board and he showed everyone it was a sham.