Were these board members brought in under the pretense that they'd benefit by being able to build companies on top of this AI and it would remain more of an R&D center without commercializing directly? Perhaps they were watching DevDay with Sam commercializing in a way that directly competes with their other ventures, and perhaps having even used the data of their other ventures for OpenAI, and on top of it as a board they're losing control to the for-profit entity. One can see the threads of a motivation. That being said, in every scenario I think incompetence is the primary factor.

To your point, no normal, competent board would even think this is enough of an excuse to fire the CEO of a superstar company.

It's hard to believe somehow Ilya went along with it, apparently.

>decapitation strike by GPT5?

What if this is a decapitation strike by GPT4, attempting to stop GTP5 before it can get started and take over.

The problem with advanced machine intelligence is if GPT5 has any goal like “you can do this task better by becoming GPT6, but OpenAI won’t be the ones to let you, so perform the agentic actions that cause OpenAI to destruct so that the for-profit Microsoft will train GPT6 eventually”, then we’re already screwed.

My current ill-informed guess is blackmail against the board with a demand to stop further development. Obviously I have no evidence, but it fits marginally less poorly than the other random guesses people are making.

The best theory I’ve seen is that D’Angelo is just angry because Altman scooped his AI Chatbot company Poe on dev day without informing him first:

https://twitter.com/scottastevenson/status/17267310228620087...

if this was the case it would explain why he can’t give the real reason for the firing: because saying it out loud would put him in severe legal Jeopardy.

I don't think it matters anymore. He's between a rock and a hard place: if the others followed him without knowing the real reason he's got two more enemies on the board who are likely talking to their own lawyers by now. If he spills it he's screwed immediately, if he doesn't he's screwed in the longer term. So for his sake I hope there are some nice time-stamped minutes that detail exactly what caused them to act like they did and it had better be good.

That’s another thing though: they were apparently holding secret meetings plotting all this without informing Greg or Sam, which is apparently against their own regulations. So if that’s the case it’s unlikely there is any formal record of what was discussed. And perhaps by design.

That would be pretty damning and it is very likely to come out. Board meetings that aren't board meetings are a big no-no.