Which is notable because Sam Altman is on said board, so he got outvoted.

So did Greg Brockman, what a weird turn of events

He would have been asked to step out and not had a vote in situations like these.

Why would Brockman have to step out of the room?

Who said anything about Brockman?

The OpenAI post, for one: Brockman lost his board seat.

Not Brockman, Altman.

Another article I read said both Sam Altman and Brockman left the room for the vote.

Greg Brockman was President and Chairman of the Board.

He was also removed from the board in this process.

Greg just announced he is leaving Open AI as well.

Announcement on twitter: https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725667410387378559

That board meeting will be in a movie someday I'm pretty sure.

Only if it was contentious. From the strength of the press release, it sounds like it was a unanimous forced-hand decision.

I doubt that Altman voted to have himself removed so probably not unanimous. A movie scene about the reveal to the board would still be compelling.

Since both Sam and Greg are gone, that implies a 4-2 decision, which is as far from unanimous decision as a 6-person board could possibly make.

Given that personnel matters affecting an individual on the board often have mandatory recusal of the affected party, that's likely a 4-0 or two 4-1 decisions, depending on how they were structured.

A single 4-0 decision would imply the bylaws allow any group of members to oust all the other members by making a single proposal to oust everyone but their group, thus automatically forcing everyone else to recuse themselves :p

Yes, this can happen, though generally the ousting party would also need to be able to point to some policy or legal transgression to do it without putting themselves at risk of a lawsuit.

Maybe Microsoft holds some sway? Sam made a snide tweet at them a few days ago. Running the whole Dev Day demo on Mac's might also be taken as some kind of statement.

Microsoft has no board seat

Even so, I'm sure Satya could get his opinion heard by many of its members if he wanted to.

The Mac thing would have nothing to do with it. Microsoft's own employees use Macs during demos

Haha yeah they are kicking out the CEO of their most profitable venture because he uses a mac.

Sam strikes me as the type of founder who would never sell out or accept an acquisition. With $10 billion already invested, what's to stop Microsoft from trying to acquire them?

DevDiv uses Macs all over the place.

OpenAI is a Foundation. IANAL, but I don't think it can be bought by a company.

Who the heck is Tasha McCauley?

That's a fascinating question. I looked into this and haven't a clue, other than Joseph Gordon-Levitt's wife (?). If it's the same person, then she is a "tech-entrepreneur" with a surprising amount of liquidity and automatic privilege and titles despite no obvious achievement (unless you consider title-gathering an achievement).

Joseph Gordon-Levitt played Travis Kalanick in super pumped

life imitates art

Maybe the tech connection explains why he was intrigued by the role

Her LinkedIn profile now 404's https://www.linkedin.com/in/tasha-mccauley-25475a54

She has changed it to just Tasha M now, odd!

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tasha-m-25475a54/

Her Twitter account has also been privated.

None of these actions should be considered unusual from a woman (and probably a man, too) who was involved in a decision the result of which (with or without knowing the context) would piss off a lot of men. The only social media it's safe to leave open are those that allow shutting down of all DMs, and don't divulge information which could identify the physical places she habituates.

No this can definitely be considered unusual, and it's misguided to paint it as angry men online. She participated in a decision that affects all of us (leadership/alignment of AI) and is now attempting to hide from the consistences of that participation (privatizing profile and change the name). You don't get to make big decisions and then hide under a rock.

You obviously haven't paid attention to the sorts of threats women who make decisions that piss off "bros" are subjected to. She isn't hiding under a rock through these actions (though may be doing things in the real world to hide). These actions just proactively limit being DMed threats.

Even without threats, no one wants to deal with the thousands of spur-of-the-moment DMs and emails that such a notable action would prompt. It's a good idea to go offline until things cool down. Any necessary statements can be made through channels, and so can the answers to questions.

"Any necessary statements can be made through channels"

you have to admin though, she made a highly controversial decision, and instead of confronting it and saying something through her own channel, she changed the name of the channel and made it private. And we're supposed to assume this is because men (specifically) are mean. Respectfully, feels like a bad take.

We technically don't even know if she voted for the expulsion, and we probably never will. 3-to-1 would work.

As an active board member she has certain legal obligations at this moment. This is why the Try Guys dragged their feet on making public statements about Ned Fulmer's expulsion from the company, and when they did finally make a statement did so as a group and explicitly stated that they couldn't talk about certain things.

OpenAI is governed by the board of the OpenAI Nonprofit, comprised of OpenAI Global, LLC employees Greg Brockman (Chairman & President), Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist), and Sam Altman (CEO), and non-employees Adam D’Angelo, Tasha McCauley, Helen Toner.

There were 6 on the board until noon today. Assuming Sam and Greg did not vote, that leaves 4. If 3 voted out, that would have been a split decision. I don't think a 50% decision would have it, I believe all 4 of the remaining members voted out.

That leaves us wondering what the hell happened, and how it came to this? It's not angry tech bros, it's folks who feel OpenAI is a great company poised to lead AI into a bright future with principles and a purpose higher than profit. And now Sam and Greg are gone.

And poof, this human who happens to be female is gone. This human needed to have a statement ready, we're all trying to DM them the same question, why?

Bachelor of Arts, MBA, and her whole career seems to be sitting on Boards of Directors and running "Foundations".

Smells like a 3-letter tool.

Same thought.

(...I don't know what this means?)

CIA / NSA plant etc.

I think this is a legitimate question. There seems to be little public information about this board member, besides that they are married to a celebrity.

Ousted Sam Altman! Remember the name.

She was involved with starting "Fellow Robots" in 2014, which is a spin-off of some sketchy for-profit AI "university" deal called "Singularity University".

AFAICT she's notable because she's been an academic and executive in the field for many years, in many different companies.

> spin-off of some sketchy for-profit AI "university" deal called "Singularity University".

Wow, that university rings some bells https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_Group#Controversie...

"An investigative report from Bloomberg Businessweek found many issues with the organization, including an alleged sexual harassment of a student by a teacher, theft and aiding of theft by an executive, and allegations of gender and disability discrimination.[12] Several early members of Singularity University were convicted of crimes, including Bruce Klein, who was convicted in 2012 of running a credit fraud operation in Alabama, and Naveen Jain, who was convicted of insider trading in 2003.[12]

In February 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, MIT Technology Review reported that a group owned by Singularity, called Abundance 360, had held a "mostly maskless" event in Santa Monica ... The event, led by Singularity co-founder Peter Diamandis, charged up to $30,000 for tickets."

Singularity University was such a funny grift. Google must have figured the best way to monetize Ray Kurzweil was to put him on a stage at the NASA/Moffett center and have him perform magic shows in front of the moneyed class. And you know, they were probably right. Not like he can still code or anything, and the lines were out the door and down the street. I visited a couple of times when my sister's old boyfriend was working there. They had all kinds of fun little booths and displays for people going through the bootcamp to gawk at.

I'm imagining the kind of person who starts their career as an executive at a spinoff of SU.

Looks like Tasha grew up in Santa Monica and currently works for RAND corporation. This is probably the most prestigious Defense think tank.

The other board member, Helen Toner list for her twitter profile: "Interests: China+ML, natsec+tech..." and works for another Defense think tank.

If there's one way the CEO of fastest growing company in the world could get fired, it's to essentially get his metaphoric security clearance pulled like Oppenheimer did.

The Oppenheimer analogy is closer than it sounds. Once the military had the technical knowledge of making the bomb, Oppenheimer was more of a liability with his pacifist leanings and had to be removed.

No one wants to risk another Ted Hall.

I don't know, but she's also on the board of EVF UK [1], which is the largest effective altruism organization.

[1] https://ev.org/effective-ventures-foundation-uk/

meaning BIG THIEVERY

THOSE MOTHERFUCKERS.

She's a plant for real.

Most transparent Fed plant if I've ever seen one.

If I'm reading this correctly, that means Ilya must have voted against Sam + Greg, right?

Yep. Ilya + the CEO of Quora + some AI governance/policy academic + the wife of an actor, together ousted Sam.

No. As one of the other commenters mentioned, Sam (and possibly Greg) probably recused himself and didn't vote (likely forced to by the board's bylaws).

So maybe it was a 3-1 vote with Ilya voting against? That would be infuriating.

infuriating, but man it's gonna make a great HBO series

Assuming Ilya voted to fire him, this clearly was not about some technical oversight or something that was unknown which suddenly came to light. its likely over some financial stuff like burn rate or undisclosed partnerships.

My impression of Ilya is that it would be far more likely to be a safety related issue than a business/profits related issue

Tasha McCauley has her own career and should not be characterized as "wife of an actor". https://www.linkedin.com/in/tasha-m-25475a54/

She seems to have deleted her LinkedIn in the past half hour. Interesting.

Edit: Just had to be logged in to see it :/

Still works for me. You might have to be logged into LinkedIn to see it.

"CEO of a < 50 person company"

> the wife of an actor

That's pretty sexist, among other things, is it not? She is a scientist and CEO of her own company, and even ignoring all that she is her own person.

That's such a meh board for a company like OpenAI.

Unless I am missing something, this must mean that Ilya voted Sam out and Greg down.

Researchers/scientists vs VCs seems to be the theme of what was going on behind the scenes, so that makes sense.

hope the scientists win, money men have made too much money off the ideas of others. They just pool money, hedge their bets and wait for a whale.