The main mistake the board made was tactical, not philosophical. From the outside, it's seems likely that Altman was running OpenAI so as to maximize the value of the for-profit entity, rather than achieve the non-profit's goals, if only because that's what he's used to doing as a tech entrepreneur. Looking at OpenAI from the outside, can you honestly say that they are acting like a non-profit in the slightest? It's perfectly believable that Altman was not working to further the non-profit's mission.

Where the board messed up is that the underestimated the need to propagandize and prepare before acting against Altman. The focus is not on how Altman did or did not turn the company away from its non-profit mission but instead on how the board was unfair and capricious towards Altman. Though this was somewhat predictable, the extent of Altman's support and personality cult is surprising to me, and is perhaps emblematic on how badly the board screwed up from an optics perspective. There were seemingly few attempts to put pressure on Altman's priorities or to emphasize the non-profit nature of the company, and the justification afterwards was unprepared and insufficient.

From the outside though, I don't understand why so many are clamoring to leave their highly paid jobs working at a non-profit who's goal is to serve humanity and to become a cog in a machine aimed at maximizing Microsoft shareholders' wealth, in defense of a singular CEO with little technical AI background who's motivations are unclear.

I mean, without overthinking it: If your company focuses on making money, you are likely to keep your job/salary. Ideally there are also other concerns affecting this choice (like not creating something that may or may not destroy humanity), but that is less tangible.

If it was to try to prevent the board becoming a useless vestigial organ incapable of meaningfully affecting the direction of the organization, it sure looks like they were right to be worried about that and acting on such concern wouldn’t be a mistake (doing it so late when the feared-state-of-things was already the actual state of things, yes, a mistake, except as a symbolic gesture).

If it was for other reasons, yeah, may simply have been dumb.

If you're going to make a symbolic gesture you don't cloak it in so much secrecy that nobody can even reasonably guess what you're trying to symbolize.

Yeah, I’d say they expected it to actually work. They misjudged just how far to the sidelines they’d already been pushed. The body nominally held all the power (any four of them voting together, that is) but in fact one member held that power.

> the "safe AI" people at OpenAI were in a unique position to help guide AI dev in as safe a direction as possible

Is it also the case that the anti-war Germans who joined the Nazi regime were in a unique position to help guide Germany in as benign direction as possible? If not, what is the difference between the "safe AI" person who decides to join OpenAI and the anti-war, anti-racist German who decides to get a job in the Nazi government or military?

That went quickly to Godwin's law .

Fair but in this case works well because it aptly demonstrates the futility of trying to change a system "from the inside" away from its core designation.