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.
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?