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Re:Sam Altman, OpenAI board open talks to negotiate his poss... by drngdds on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @05:45PM (#38371567)
Maybe Ilya realized he was acting emotionally and messed up massively by getting rid of Sam and a truthful explanation would make him look like an idiot

Or alternately, he made a well-reasoned and principled decision by getting rid of Sam, but now everyone thinks he's awful for it and he's trying to save face and avoid ruining his own career

Or a secret third thing, of course

Re:Sam Altman, OpenAI board open talks to negotiate his poss... by adastra22 on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @06:49PM (#38372356)
There's enough out in the open to make a reasonable guess at the third thing. Sam was raising funds for a for-profit side gig uncontrolled by the OpenAI board which would develop TPU hardware to compete with NVIDIA. He was pitching autocratic regimes in the middle east, among others.

If the board had just found out about this, it would totally check all the boxes. Making something that could be destabilizing for the ecosystem or compete with OAI's partners, something which is arguably within scope of OAI itself yet he's raising funds as a venture he wholly controls while using time and possibly resources of OAI in the process (self-dealing?), etc.

It's enough of a gray area that all those things would be above board (hah!) if he had notified them and kept them in the loop, but a fireable offense if he hadn't.

Re:Sam Altman, OpenAI board open talks to negotiate his poss... by foobarqux on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @06:18PM (#38371986)
It turned out he potentially zeroed a bunch of peoples' stock so the knives came out.