In this situation the most powerful people on the board should have been Altman, Brockman and Sutskever. The others were sort of nice to haves who were there just to fill it out. For them to run this coup is just insane. There has to be more to it. Someone has to be pulling the strings with a plan.

Put me in the "Ilya didn't realize what firing Altman / demoting Brockman would actually mean and is trying to correct his mistake" camp.

Then He should be fired for incompetence and never given a leadership position ever again.

I don’t even like Sam but jeeze. Know the score what a fool.

Exactly. Too many people arguing incompetence as if its a valid excuse.

Imagine its even true - that they werent his reasons and he was just told them. He voted to fire him and then executed the firing despite not agreeing with the reasons himself? Completely inexcusable even in the bizarre scenario that its true.

This could well be, but I still struggle to grasp it. He seemed so much smarter. Were they manipulative or beguiling? Does he cave to the merest social pressure? And that Quora CEO should have know such flimsy excuses were BS and this would be a firestorm. I’ve never seen group think so powerful, outside of junior devs and elementary school students. I’m generally not a conspiracy theorist, and I have no good candidate conspiracies in mind, but this situation feels so extraordinary that it practically begs for a shadowy figure with bags of cash.

> This could well be, but I still struggle to grasp it. He seemed so much smarter

This isn't about intelligence but about business experience.

Oh, I don’t know, when most adults are so inexperienced, they’re typically timid before committing monumental and irrevocable acts. I mean, granted, given the strength of his aptitudes, perhaps he’s not as well rounded, with narrower range of life experiences. Still, the red flags would be hard to ignore. Was this like a Milgram conformance to authority situation? Either way, there were so many people on and off the board, and allowed to dwindle to the point that a quorum was a mere 4 people. They treated it like a toothless advisory board. It’s like letting your kids babysit themselves in an armory.

> Someone has to be pulling the strings with a plan.

Why do people keep insisting on this, when the entirety of human history is littered with dumb mistakes made by a mix of well- and evil-meaning people, in totally uncoordinated ways, with no concept of the consequences?

Popular media aside, human beings aren't smart, consistent, or disciplined enough to pull off these elaborate schemes. And the tiny tiny percentage of people who might be the exception are too smart to do so with such spectacular incompetence.

Like the man says, it's a headless bunder operating under the illusion of a master plan.

It's wouldn't be that surprising, I've seen these kind of group dynamics play out fairly often. If D'Angelo, McCauley, and Toner formed a clique, and Sustkever was easily influenced by clique politics, that's all it would take. A lot of people will buckle surprisingly fast to social pressure and clique politics. Its also something that can blindside hardworking individuals who assume that others are above this type of stuff.

I'm not saying that's how it played out. But I've often seen social bullies - even ones who are mostly hated - have more success than hard working individuals who get targeted. Even if someone is a competent individual, a lot of their colleagues will abandon then if they're convinced the individual is a target.

If this is the case, and Ilya is truly a non-political guy, I feel awful about how badly he was manipulated.

Imagine how he feels.

It doesn't seem to reconcile well with the earlier paragraph:

> chief scientist and co-founder Sutskever, who helped vote Altman out and did the actual firing of him over Google Meet

If you're voting and doing the firing, you should know the reason.