What did you hear that sounded valid? Toner had her chance to make her case here, and it was simply that Altman tried to get her fired, so she retaliated. It wasn't about safety or leadership. It was petty politics over board control.
I don't think it's that simple.
First, after confronting Toner directly and getting a response he didn't like, Altman went behind her back to the other board members trying to get her fired. That's not what a responsible CEO does. A responsible CEO, if he does not agree with the position taken by one Board member, brings that concern openly to the rest of the Board in a formal setting. He doesn't go behind the one Board member's back. If Altman really believed Toner's actions had harmed the company, his responsibility as a CEO was to bring that concern openly to the Board and let them make the call openly. And that's especially true for a company that, according to Altman's own public claims, has stewardship of a technology that could be an existential threat to humans. That makes any behind-the-scenes maneuvering on his part even more of a problem.
Second, according to the article, other Board members had concerns about Altman's honesty, and not just due to whatever transpired during Altman's behind-the-back attempts to get Toner fired. So it's not just that particular incident that's relevant here.
That's not to say that the Board didn't make mistakes. I agree with other posters that they should have seen the consequences coming for firing Altman. It also appears, from the fact that the lawyer's advice about fiduciary duty came after they fired Altman, that they didn't seek legal advice before doing that, which seems like an obvious mistake. (It's possible, though, that they did ask the lawyer beforehand and he didn't raise the possibility of a backlash and consequent damage to the company, which would put at least some of the blame on him.) I just don't think that because the Board messed up, that makes Altman the good guy. I don't think any of these people come out of this looking good. Certainly I don't have confidence in any of them as stewards of AI if AI is really as big a deal as they think it is.
Yes and no.
Meetings are a terrible way to drive toward decisions but a great way to signal positions to others. Or "decision meetings" bad; "consensus meetings" good.
If you're driving one of those, you should know how everyone involved feels before they meet. You should lobby any of them beforehand if necessary. The idea is to try to make sure you have buy-in before everyone shows up - no drag-out arguments, no rabbit trails, just statements of their positions and a thumbs up.
And Altman seems to know that, given his behavior.
The decision Altman was driving for was to fire a Board member he disagreed with. That's fundamentally different from an ordinary Board decision, and should not be lobbied for in advance the way you would organize support in advance for a normal Board decision. When the CEO of the company has a fundamental disagreement with a Board member, and wants to get that Board member fired, lobbying beforehand behind the one Board member's back is fundamentally dishonest. He should put the disagreement before the entire Board openly.
Btw, if I were Toner, as soon as I knew I had a fundamental disagreement with the CEO, I would have told the other Board members and requested a Board meeting to discuss the matter (and told the CEO I was doing those things). The meeting would not have to be an actual decision meeting with the Board formally in session. But I would want any discussion to take place with everyone present and with everything openly out on the table, not in behind-the-back individual sessions. I'm somewhat surprised that Toner didn't do that.
No, but lying to Board members about what other Board members have said is. The employee equivalent would be lying to one member of the C-suite about what another had said.
Yes. He's not a teenage girl, he's the CEO of a nonprofit. At his level this is fraudulent misrepresentation.
The rack up debt and fail on mediocre idea and then sell your only valuable resource, your human employees Plan gave him a lot of money to hire a lot of law school grads who have since made partner.
I agree with this as a general principle, but in this specific case, the 'understanding group dynamics' part is the 'critical aspect of the job' part. By the same token, you don't just promote the best engineer to CEO if he's bad at managing, because the managing is the critical part of the job.
That and that alone is enough to question their competence, though. The impression I get is that Toner has been in the academic/nonprofit world for so long that she doesn't understand how the real world works. In those places, the sad truth is nothing you really do is of much consequence to anybody in the grand scheme of things, other than you collecting prestige and a paycheck.
Then she tried making a consequential decision in an organization valued at around $90 billion, and lo and behold, people started caring about her actions in a way she has never experienced before.
As someone who pretty harshly described the board's actions, I agree with the first part of what you wrote, but I don't agree with this.
People can be good at critical aspects of their job while lacking the maturity to understand large group dynamics. I thought this quote from the article said a lot:
> The board members weren’t prepared for the fallout from their decision. The members, including Toner, were taken aback by staffers’ apparent willingness to abandon the company without Altman at the helm and the extent to which the management team sided with the ousted CEO, according to people familiar with the matter.
It's pretty hard to me to think, based on the board's initial press release, that there wouldn't be a huge fallout from this decision. The release also made me think that Altman had done something truly egregious/malevolent, and that wasn't the case.
What I saw this as was a group of people who had real concerns about Altman's leadership, and some of those concerns ended up sounding pretty valid, but who didn't have the experience/maturity to understand how to go about the next step. OpenAI's "frankenstein" org structure, with a board beholden to the nonprofit's charter but also responsible for billions in investor capital, also helped contribute to this cluster-f.