"After six months, they realised our entire floor was duplicating the work of the one upstairs".
Half the board has not had a real job ever. I’m serious.
I don't know if that is accurate, or even fair - the only thing I can see, is that there's very little open information regarding them.
From the little I can find, Tasha seems to have worked at NASA Research Park, as well as having been CEO for startup called Geo Sim Cities. Stanford and CMU alumni? While other websites say Bard college and University of Southern California.
As for Helen, she seems to have worked as a researcher in both academia and Open Philanthropy.
Shocking. Simply shocking.
I've seen too much automatic praise given to this board under the unbacked assumption that this decision was some pure, mission-driven action, and not enough criticism of an org structure that allows a board to bet against the long term success of the underlying organization.
And the other guy is the founder of Quora and Poe.
She has quite a track record of short tenures and failures.
It may be good to have a failure perspective on a board as a counter-balance. I don't think this is a valid knock against her. She has relevant industry experience at least.
What products did she deliver?
> It may be good to have a failure perspective on a board as a counter-balance.
Maybe some small mom and pop company not on the board of OpenAI
What have her companies done?
(Especially if they aren't made aware of each other until the end.)
It is breach of contract if it violated his employment contract, but I don't have a copy of his contract. It is wrongful termination if it was for an illegal reason, but there doesn't seem to be any suggestion of that.
> same for MS
I doubt very much that the contract with Microsoft limits OpenAI's right to manage their own personnel, so probably not.
Wrongful termination only applies when someone is fired for illegal reasons, like racial discrimination, or retaliation, for example.
I mean I’m sure they can all sue each other for all kinds of reasons, but firing someone without a good reason isn’t really one of them.
He would also have very good grounds for a civil suit for disparagement. Or at least he would have if Microsoft didn't immediately step up and offer him the world.
A hypothetical example: Would you agree that it's an appropriate thing to do if the second project was Alignment-related, Sam lied or misled about the existence of the second team, to Ilya, because he believed that Ilya was over-aligning their AIs and reducing their functionality?
Its easy to view the board's lack of candor as "they're hiding a really bad, unprofessional decision"; which is probable at this point. You could also view it with the conclusion that, they made an initial miscalculated mistake in communication, and are now overtly and extremely careful in everything they say because the company is leaking like a sieve and they don't want to get into a game of mudslinging with Sam.
Yet you're only willing to give this to one side and not the other? Seems reasonable... Especially despite all the evidence so far that the board is either completely incompetent or had ulterior motives.
Have these people never worked at any other company before? Probably every company with more than 10 employees does something like this.