This situation is simultaneously "reckless board makes ill-considered mistake to suddenly fire CEO with insufficient justification" and "non-profit CEO slowly changes the culture of a non-profit to turn it into profit-seeking enterprise that he has a large amount of control over".
Even in a nonprofit, the board has an obligation to maintain a good working relationship with their organization. It's very rare for a board member to publicly criticized for their own organization.
Also, this argument goes out the window because OpenAI is not just a nonprofit. When they started their for-profit subsidiary in 2019, they accepted a fiduciary duty to their investors.
Majority shareholders may have some fiduciary responsibility to minority shareholders, so you might be able to make the argument that the board as a whole shouldn’t write disparaging remarks about the company. But even that argument is tenuous.
Her only personal fiduciary responsibility is to the mission defined in that collection of words, not to the employees of the for-profit.
That’s how this works whether you think it should or not.
You implied that she couldn't publicly disparage the for-profit because the board has a fiduciary responsibility to the minority investors in the the for-profit. I only piped up to correct that single point because it's wrong.
And that responsibility is defined as a fiduciary duty to the mission of the organization as defined in the charter.
As a fellow board member, if Sam thinks Helen's behavior is in conflict with the mission of OpenAI as defined in the charter, he is free to push for her removal.
Did they?
Even more in the case of OpenAI, the board member is on the board of a non-profit, those are typical much more independent and very often more critical of the decisions made by other board members. Just search for board members criticising medical/charity/government boards they are sitting on, there are plenty.
That's not even considering if the article was in fact critical.
her independence from openai was the nominal reason she was asked to supervise it in the first place, wasn't it
>During the call, Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, said the board was endangering the future of the company by pushing out Mr. Altman. This, he said, violated the members’ responsibilities.
>Ms. Toner disagreed. The board’s mission is to ensure that the company creates artificial intelligence that “benefits all of humanity,” and if the company was destroyed, she said, that could be consistent with its mission.
This person is too far gone. Life isn't a movie.
Criticism (especially valid criticism) is not sabotage, and in any case the board's responsibility is to advance the charter, not to support the (non-profit) company regardless of what it's doing.
This comment is a credibility killer. "This person", as a member of the board of a non-profit, has a duty to keep the non-profit on mission, and even to call for its dissolution if that isn't possible.
This is delusion, and she thinks she's some hero that's saving the world by keeping it a non-profit when in reality it's just creating needless chaos and even impacting innocent people's livelihoods.
probably not, but continuing to publish research papers of the kind that got her the job in the first place seems reasonable maybe
but that's what altman was criticizing her for, not for committing crimes, which as far as anyone knows she hasn't done
> There's 700+ employees that disagree with her interpretation
maybe, maybe not, but the standard way that nonprofits and other companies work is that the employees do what the management tells them, the management does what the board tells them, and the board does what the shareholders or the charter tells them, and in all cases, if they refuse, they get fired
if you're an employee at the american cancer society and you decide that malaria in africa is a more important cause, you probably shouldn't expect to be able to continue using the acs's assets to fight malaria in africa. it might happen, but you shouldn't be at all surprised if you get fired
They likely violated RICO by essentially nuking the company's valuation and trying to sell to Anthropic. That is a crime, by the way, so they don't seem above that.
They haven't given even a clear reason for firing Sam. "Not being candid" with no evidence doesn't sound like it directly violates "the charter", but you can really argue anything when you're just "interpreting" the charter.
Anyway, you can make infinite excuses for their actions and justify them infinite ways. Hopefully you agree that the current situation is a giant mess, and it's caused by their narrow misguided interpretation of their job, and it's at the expense of basically everybody else.
LOL
Nothing you have said is credible or honest.
Really. What is/are the predicate offense(s) for this alleged RICO violation?
Should you argue in bad faith?
In many cases they're industry experts / academics and in many cases those academics continue to publish papers that look objectively at the actions of all companies in their sphere of influence, including the one they're on the board of.
It's _expected_ for them to publish this type of material. It's literally their job. Cheerleading is for the C-suite.
Imo you have to commit to working within an organization if you're on its board, you can't burn it down from within. I think it's less of an issue to try to remove the CEO if you don't agree with the direction they're taking, but this was obviously done in a sloppy manner in this case, and their willingness to destroy it makes me distrust them (not that my opinion matters per se).
I don't think it was done in a sloppy manner, I think there's a huge amount of spin and froth being generated to make it _look_ like it was done in a sloppy manner, but the reality is that the board took an executive action, released a discreet and concisely worded press release and then fell silent, which is 100% professional behaviour.
To me it's the other side that are acting sloppily, they're thrashing around like maniacs, they're obviously calling in favours behind the scenes as supportive articles are popping up all over the place, apparently employees were calling other employees in the middle of the night urging them to sign the 'I'll quit unless' letter, employees have been fed a misleading narrative (two of them, actually) about why the action was taken in the first place which riled them up...
I have to assume here that the board - as they're the ones acting professionally - similarly acted professionally before the firing and discussed the matter at great length and only resorted to this last minute firing because of exigent circumstances. The fact that a fired employee was able to cajole/bluff/whatever his way back into the office to prove some sort of point suggests that the board's action may have been necessary. What exactly was done during that time in the office, one might ask? Were systems accessed? Surely it was an unauthorised entry and a major security violation.
You do see that that action (re-entering the office after being fired) gives off lunatic vibes, don't you? Maybe it really did come down to 'yeah you're technically my boss but I'm gonna do whatever the hell I want and there's nothing you can do about it because everyone loves me' to which the board's only possible course of action is to fire immediately.
Either by himself or by the person that permitted him access knowing beyond any reasonable doubt that they were not authorized to be there?
If systems were accessed, was another crime committed?
If a person facilitated that access, has the boundary for 'conspiracy to commit...' been reached?
I just find the whole thing weird. I just think it seems unlikely that a board would decide something then about-face so rapidly as to have a meeting at the office the next day. It would be conventional for further meetings to take place at the offices of lawyers, for example.
It would also be normal for the non-fired members of staff to be instructed to have no further contact with the fired person without legal counsel present.
Sometimes it seems very much like everyone here is really playing to the cameras in a big way.
It's basically restating 'her role is to cheerlead' but with more sophisticated wording.
You haven't made an argument, you've just used longer words to restate your (incorrect) opinion.
Also I never said they had an 'advisory' board. Board members ar either executive or non-executive members. If they're nonexec then their role is to advise the executive members. They're generally fairly independent and many nonexecutive board members serve on the boards of multiple companies, sometimes including ones that are nominally in competition with each other.
> Also I never said they had an 'advisory' board
From your comment: "...it's absolutely the role of advisory board members to continue their work".
Not sure how someone is meant to parse that except for you to imply that she was a member of an advisory board.
Someone is meant to use context and understand that when the context clearly refers to someone who is well known to be a member of the board of directors, 'advisory board member' means that they are a board member in an advisory role, aka a nonexec.
That assumes that someone is familiar with the structure and makeup of boards of directors. It's a bit rude to participate in a conversation if you're not familiar with the subject matter and the meaning of words-in-context as you just waste peoples time making them elaborate.
No, those are not synonyms. Advisory boards are distinct from the board of directors. Advisory board members have roles similar to what you alluded to in your original comment and do not have fiduciary duties, hence my confusion.
Non-exec board members are not involved with day-to-day business operations but their fiduciary duties are no different than exec members.
Language has meaning. Don't insult others for your own clumsy usage.
Only human!
> Don't insult others for your own clumsy usage.
We're on the internet. Something like 25% of internet discourse is nitpicking vocabulary. Let's keep traditions alive this holiday season!