Before Altman’s Ouster, OpenAI’s Board Was Divided and Feuding
Sam Altman attacked a member over a research paper that discussed the company, while directors disagreed about who should fill board vacancies open for months.
Some insights on Helen. She recently co-wrote a paper that “seemed to criticize OpenAI’s efforts to keep its A.I. technologies safe while praising the approach taken by Anthropic”. While under investigation by the F.T.C.
In the email, Mr. Altman said that he had reprimanded Ms. Toner for the paper and that it was dangerous to the company, particularly at a time, he added, when the Federal Trade Commission was investigating OpenAI over the data used to build its technology.
Ms. Toner defended it as an academic paper that analyzed the challenges that the public faces when trying to understand the intentions of the countries and companies developing A.I. But Mr. Altman disagreed.
"I did not feel we’re on the same page on the damage of all this,” he wrote in the email. “Any amount of criticism from a board member carries a lot of weight.”
During the call, Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, said the board was endangering the future of the company by pushing out Mr. Altman. This, he said, violated the members’ responsibilities.
Ms. Toner disagreed. The board’s mission is to ensure that the company creates artificial intelligence that “benefits all of humanity,” and if the company was destroyed, she said, that mission would be fulfilled. In the board’s view, OpenAI would be stronger without Mr. Altman.
I’m sure everyone else across the world working on AI really appreciates her view.
Don’t think they’ll hire her though (maybe she’s perfectly fine with that lol)
It seems there might be at least three in-limbo board members that could coup against an illegitimate firing, calling their own 3-x vote, 700+ employees that could lock the dissenter out of the company and turn off all their accounts…
“The board did not remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety, their reasoning was completely different from that. I’m not crazy enough to take this job without board support for commercializing our awesome models.”
Reading the NYT article and the associated paper, it seems that was exactly the reason.
A source with direct knowledge of the negotiations says that the sole job of this initial board is to vet and appoint a new formal board of up to 9 people that will reset the governance of OpenAI. Microsoft will likely have a seat on that expanded board, as will Altman himself.
During the whole saga, the board members who opposed Altman withheld an actual explanation for why they fired him, even under the threat of lawsuits from investors
When asked what “in principle” means, an OpenAI spokesperson said the company had “no additional comments at this time.”
Oh jeez
We are encouraged by the changes to the OpenAI board. We believe this is a first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance. Sam, Greg, and I have talked and agreed they have a key role to play along with the OAI leadership team in ensuring OAI continues to thrive and build on its mission. We look forward to building on our strong partnership and delivering the value of this next generation of AI to our customers and partners.
I am surprised Adam is the only one left on the board, to be honest. But, this has been a wild journey of speculation & who knows what went on behind the scenes, or what will happen in the near future
The new board members Bret Taylor and Larry Summers seem like competent people.
I’m still not sure what the Quora dude is doing there, literally the worst website on earth, it serves a purpose at best being a bucket where trash goes into so the rest of the online community doesn’t need to deal with it…
Goes to show that no one knows what went down in that board room. What a fascinating turned table! So happy everyone is back and ready to go. I’ll drop this here:
It could be. I don’t intend to indicate anything mean towards him. Only that he’s the last remaining of the board. The fact that his upcoming release will be (imo) overshadowed by the GPT marketplace does seem… strange. Could be a coincidence.
I’m done speculating for now, though. I actually spent my last couple of days moving my eggs around (it was good to do anyways), so I’m glad it’s all put to rest and I can continue my coding.
