We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO

Re:We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to retu... by nathanasmith on Wednesday November 22, 2023 @05:22AM (#38377390)

What lofty goals? The board was questioned repeatedly and never articulated clear reasoning for firing Altman and in the process lost the confidence of the employees hence the "rally". The lack of clarity was their undoing whether there would have been a bag for the employees to lose or not.

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Re:We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to retu... by jprete on Wednesday November 22, 2023 @07:59AM (#38378567)

I think the reason is that Altman is very good at getting his way without leaving fingerprints, so it might not be possible to explain it to other people in a satisfactory way.

And frankly a lot of analytic techies are blind to this kind of thing, so they assume it must not exist. But it clearly does.

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Re:We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to retu... by murakamiiq84 on Wednesday November 22, 2023 @05:56PM (#38386365)

My story: Maybe they had lofty goals, maybe not, but it sounded like the whole thing was instigated by Altman trying to fire Toner (one of the board members) over a silly pretext of her coauthoring a paper that nobody read that was very mildly negative about OpenAI, during her day job. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/technology/openai-altman-...

And then presumably the other board members read the writing on the wall (especially seeing how 3 other board members mysteriously resigned, including Hoffman https://www.semafor.com/article/11/19/2023/reid-hoffman-was-...), and realized that if Altman can kick out Toner under such flimsy pretexts, they'd be out too.

So they allied with Helen to countercoup Greg/Sam.

I think the anti-board perspective is that this is all shallow bickering over a 90B company. The pro-board perspective is that the whole point of the board was to serve as a check on the CEO, so if the CEO could easily appoint only loyalists, then the board is a useless rubber stamp that lends unfair legitimacy to OpenAI's regulatory capture efforts.

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