When you have irreconcilable differences with the board you could theoretically jump ship and start a rival company. Usually, in practice, that’s impossibly hard and yet Microsoft announced that they intended to do exactly that with funding and stock matching. For some reason that was turned down in favor of staging the equivalent of an in-country coup.
If you get caught breaking the law on vacation abroad and your response to being arrested is to take control of the country in retaliation then you are a very powerful, persuasive, or threatening person indeed.
You know a number of people are in that position though.
My first thought went to Samsung's chairman who will break the law and go to prison, but the country will have him back, bending over backwards to somewhat have it make sense.
Reminds me of the Wirecard scandal doc on Netflix. Wirecard was so powerful that the financial regulators (BaFin) started targeting journalists and actively defending a publicly traded company.
The board's major mistake was not communicating why he was let go.
My guess is that the likely reason why employees threatened to go was that they felt Altman had the best chances of making the for-profit arm's shares skyrocket. As a non-profit company's board, I'd be fine letting those people walk out the front door along with the CEO that was just fired.
It is my understanding that the key personnel who developed the actual technology were not part of the group threatening to leave. It was mainly the group in the for-profit arm that Altman had trojan-horsed into the company structure.
> This included the company's key leadership.
I'm not aware of the machine learning researchers responsible for the core technology threatening to leave. Who were they?
I would challenge you to name a researcher who didn't resign or threaten to resign. Remember, they all had a plausible landing spot: They could simply show up at Microsoft with all the same leadership, coworkers, salary, compute, and IP the next day. OpenAI as we know it was over unless and until the board gave in.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/95-percent-of-openai-employees-t... [2] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/three-senior-openai-...
I still wager that things would have been different had the board clearly stated their reasons. Doesn't make any sense that they did it months later. The signing of the petition seems mostly group think and political. I would guess that the majority of employees would have followed through.
Lastly, I still can't say any of this makes any sense. Why did the employees even care about Altman? It still seems all very strange to leave your job for someone who doesn't seem to have ever said anything meaningful.
Ilya Sutskever, Alec Radford, Wojciech Zaremba, Nick Ryder, Mark Chen, ... how many names do you want? >90% of the company threatened to leave.
Him joining the pile-on when it was already clear how big it is was pretty much surrendering to the mob, and was perceived as such even at the time.
Guess you'd be fine being the board over a company that now only consists of a board. Thumbs up.
Instead, they did not even attempt to communicate any rationale behind their actions.
Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.
https://openai.com/index/openai-announces-leadership-transit...
I even said so at the time.
Instead, it's good form to wait 6 months and then do a Business Insider interview on the topic?
Also, "bad mouthing" suggests putting a spin on it. Based on the article, they should have been able to list out several objective facts that supported their decision. Instead, they opened it all up to intense speculation by providing a vague justification and by remaining tight lipped even once it became clear that a lot of clarification was needed.
But, what kind of Wild West is this? It's all so unhinged and strange.
There are no NDAs, non-competes or other impediments? MS just guts OpenAI at its whim?
>there would have been no OpenAI left to preside over.
...If MS can do this, then there's already no OpenAI left to preside over.
It is a very pro employee policy, hence attractive to the best and brightest.
I mentioned non-competes as one of a universe of things that makes this unusual; including its original non-profit status becoming substantially for-profit, and the apparent ease with which MS can now gut the supposedly controlling non-profit and walk away with everything.
And, I'm guessing even the CA policy on non-competes wasn't conceived with the idea of one company simply "taking" another company at-will, even if that scenario is technically covered.
All businesses at all times are subject to losing their employees to another employer who is willing to pay enough for them.
But if they had the moral conviction, it seems like this would have been the right choice to make, because it would have diluted Altman's power (unless they trust Nadella even less than they trust Altman?)