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> Once you screw this up to such an incredible degree, how can anyone really trust that you were doing the rest of your job well? As someone who pretty harshly

> Once you screw this up to such an incredible degree, how can anyone really trust that you were doing the rest of your job well? As someone who pretty harshly described the board's actions, I agree with the first part of what you wrote, but I don't agree with this. People can be good at critical aspects of their job while lacking the maturity to understand large group dynamics. I thought this quote from the article said a lot: > The board members weren’t prepared for the fallout from their decision. The members, including Toner, were taken aback by staffers’ apparent willingness to abandon the company without Altman at the helm and the extent to which the management team sided with the ousted CEO, according to people familiar with the matter. It's pretty hard to me to think, based on the board's initial press release, that there wouldn't be a huge fallout from this decision. The release also made me think that Altman had done something truly egregious/malevolent, and that wasn't the case. What I saw this as was a group of people who had real concerns about Altman's leadership, and some of those concerns ended up sounding pretty valid, but who didn't have the experience/maturity to understand how to go about the next step. OpenAI's "frankenstein" org structure, with a board beholden to the nonprofit's charter but also responsible for billions in investor capital, also helped contribute to this cluster-f.

jacquesm 3y ago
The scariest two words: 'unconsciously incompetent'. That's where the biggest accidents come from. At least you can recognize malice and do something about it.
WillPostForFood 3y ago
>What I saw this as was a group of people who had real concerns about Altman's leadership, and some of those concerns ended up sounding pretty valid, What did you hear that sounded valid? Toner had her chance to make her case here, and it was simply that Altman tried to get her fired, so she retaliated. It wasn't about safety or leadership. It was petty politics over board control.
- tcbawo 3y ago
  The article alleges that the board compared notes after speaking individually with Altman and determined that he had misrepresented statements/opinions from the other board members when speaking to them one on one. This caused the board to believe Altman is/was not being genuine and honest with them. Is an attempt to manipulate the other board members into firing one board member reason enough to be fired?
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > Is an attempt to manipulate the other board members into firing another board member reason enough to be fired? No, but lying to Board members about what other Board members have said is. The employee equivalent would be lying to one member of the C-suite about what another had said.
  - jstarfish 3y ago
    > Is an attempt to manipulate the other board members into firing one board member reason enough to be fired? Yes. He's not a teenage girl, he's the CEO of a nonprofit. At his level this is fraudulent misrepresentation.
  - rendang 3y ago
    The board should have shared those specific details with their initial announcement. Might not have been enough to win over the employees/stakeholders, but they'd have a much better chance that way than how things actually played out
  - user_named 3y ago
    There were no notes.
    - PhysicsOfCivics 3y ago
      But there were plenty of lawyers on all sides with some threatening to sue anyone who said a bad word about Altman regardless of the truth. A threat can be exactly worded or implied. The rack up debt and fail on mediocre idea and then sell your only valuable resource, your human employees Plan gave him a lot of money to hire a lot of law school grads who have since made partner.
jdminhbg 3y ago
> People can be good at critical aspects of their job while lacking the maturity to understand large group dynamics. I agree with this as a general principle, but in this specific case, the 'understanding group dynamics' part is the 'critical aspect of the job' part. By the same token, you don't just promote the best engineer to CEO if he's bad at managing, because the managing is the critical part of the job.
kmlevitt 3y ago
>What I saw this as was a group of people who had real concerns about Altman's leadership, and some of those concerns ended up sounding pretty valid, but who didn't have the experience/maturity to understand how to go about the next step. That and that alone is enough to question their competence, though. The impression I get is that Toner has been in the academic/nonprofit world for so long that she doesn't understand how the real world works. In those places, the sad truth is nothing you really do is of much consequence to anybody in the grand scheme of things, other than you collecting prestige and a paycheck. Then she tried making a consequential decision in an organization valued at around $90 billion, and lo and behold, people started caring about her actions in a way she has never experienced before.

jacquesm 3y ago

The scariest two words: 'unconsciously incompetent'. That's where the biggest accidents come from. At least you can recognize malice and do something about it.

WillPostForFood 3y ago

>What I saw this as was a group of people who had real concerns about Altman's leadership, and some of those concerns ended up sounding pretty valid, What did you hear that sounded valid? Toner had her chance to make her case here, and it was simply that Altman tried to get her fired, so she retaliated. It wasn't about safety or leadership. It was petty politics over board control.

tcbawo 3y ago
The article alleges that the board compared notes after speaking individually with Altman and determined that he had misrepresented statements/opinions from the other board members when speaking to them one on one. This caused the board to believe Altman is/was not being genuine and honest with them. Is an attempt to manipulate the other board members into firing one board member reason enough to be fired?
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > Is an attempt to manipulate the other board members into firing another board member reason enough to be fired? No, but lying to Board members about what other Board members have said is. The employee equivalent would be lying to one member of the C-suite about what another had said.
- jstarfish 3y ago
  > Is an attempt to manipulate the other board members into firing one board member reason enough to be fired? Yes. He's not a teenage girl, he's the CEO of a nonprofit. At his level this is fraudulent misrepresentation.
- rendang 3y ago
  The board should have shared those specific details with their initial announcement. Might not have been enough to win over the employees/stakeholders, but they'd have a much better chance that way than how things actually played out
- user_named 3y ago
  There were no notes.
  - PhysicsOfCivics 3y ago
    But there were plenty of lawyers on all sides with some threatening to sue anyone who said a bad word about Altman regardless of the truth. A threat can be exactly worded or implied. The rack up debt and fail on mediocre idea and then sell your only valuable resource, your human employees Plan gave him a lot of money to hire a lot of law school grads who have since made partner.

jdminhbg 3y ago

> People can be good at critical aspects of their job while lacking the maturity to understand large group dynamics. I agree with this as a general principle, but in this specific case, the 'understanding group dynamics' part is the 'critical aspect of the job' part. By the same token, you don't just promote the best engineer to CEO if he's bad at managing, because the managing is the critical part of the job.

kmlevitt 3y ago

>What I saw this as was a group of people who had real concerns about Altman's leadership, and some of those concerns ended up sounding pretty valid, but who didn't have the experience/maturity to understand how to go about the next step. That and that alone is enough to question their competence, though. The impression I get is that Toner has been in the academic/nonprofit world for so long that she doesn't understand how the real world works. In those places, the sad truth is nothing you really do is of much consequence to anybody in the grand scheme of things, other than you collecting prestige and a paycheck. Then she tried making a consequential decision in an organization valued at around $90 billion, and lo and behold, people started caring about her actions in a way she has never experienced before.