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I haven't personally seen any credible evidence to explain that, which is a bit spooky.

__loam 3y ago
I think Occam's Razor applies here, which is to say an inexperienced and idealistic board got cold feet and tried to remove Altman on principle. They failed because Altman is not only a political animal, but also one with friends in high places. Can't remove the helmsman at peak hype cycle and expect no consequences.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  Are the OpenAI employees involved in this at all? Perhaps due to wanting a payday, and seeing higher chances of it with Altman?
  - theGnuMe 3y ago
    Yeah they threatened to walk.. it was all over twitter.
baking 3y ago
I don't understand why people refuse to see it. They had a nine-member board with three insiders but three independent directors resigned so they were split 3-3. The board was split on choosing new directors so they were at an impasse for months. Then Altman cooked up an excuse to attempt to remove one of the independent directors and lied to other board members about it and that convinced Ilya Sutskever to vote to remove Altman from the board to restore its independence. Firing Altman was just fallout from that. Edit: It occurs to me that Ilya could have resolved the situation by resigning from the board, but I suppose that was a non-obvious solution.
- ben_w 3y ago
  The problem with all the "Sam was bad" scenarios I've seen is: why did all the replacement CEOs chosen by the board side with Sam instead of the board? My pet conspiracy theory on this is that members of the board were blackmailed by someone who wanted Sam gone, didn't want to admit whatever the embarrassing secret was, were therefore unable to give a convincing explanation to any of their chosen replacement CEOs. But even I don't take this seriously, it's merely the only story I've got that doesn't seem to contradict any of the observed actions.
  - baking 3y ago
    Because the CEOs saw themselves as the head of a for-profit company while the board was governing a public charity. We've had this discussion before.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      You appear to be saying the board, who chose each of these people, were unable to find someone who would view this particular issue their way? To accidentally hire one such CEO may be regarded as a misfortune; to accidentally hire three in a week looks like carelessness.

I think Occam's Razor applies here, which is to say an inexperienced and idealistic board got cold feet and tried to remove Altman on principle. They failed because Altman is not only a political animal, but also one with friends in high places. Can't remove the helmsman at peak hype cycle and expect no consequences.

lotsofpulp 3y ago
Are the OpenAI employees involved in this at all? Perhaps due to wanting a payday, and seeing higher chances of it with Altman?
- theGnuMe 3y ago
  Yeah they threatened to walk.. it was all over twitter.

baking 3y ago

I don't understand why people refuse to see it. They had a nine-member board with three insiders but three independent directors resigned so they were split 3-3. The board was split on choosing new directors so they were at an impasse for months. Then Altman cooked up an excuse to attempt to remove one of the independent directors and lied to other board members about it and that convinced Ilya Sutskever to vote to remove Altman from the board to restore its independence. Firing Altman was just fallout from that. Edit: It occurs to me that Ilya could have resolved the situation by resigning from the board, but I suppose that was a non-obvious solution.

ben_w 3y ago
The problem with all the "Sam was bad" scenarios I've seen is: why did all the replacement CEOs chosen by the board side with Sam instead of the board? My pet conspiracy theory on this is that members of the board were blackmailed by someone who wanted Sam gone, didn't want to admit whatever the embarrassing secret was, were therefore unable to give a convincing explanation to any of their chosen replacement CEOs. But even I don't take this seriously, it's merely the only story I've got that doesn't seem to contradict any of the observed actions.
- baking 3y ago
  Because the CEOs saw themselves as the head of a for-profit company while the board was governing a public charity. We've had this discussion before.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    You appear to be saying the board, who chose each of these people, were unable to find someone who would view this particular issue their way? To accidentally hire one such CEO may be regarded as a misfortune; to accidentally hire three in a week looks like carelessness.