The board of directors trying to get Altman back after firing him effective immediately, failing, and giving the job to their second choice underscores the level of incompetence and lack of professionalism at OpenAI. They seem to be in a bit over their heads with a company that is supposedly worth 80bln dollars. Not with that board it's worth that much.
Is there any good evidence of the board actually wanting him back? Sure, he was invited back into the office, but maybe Mira allowed this as CEO? From the outside it seems plausible that the board was just under immense pressure but was firm in its decision. If he had come back and the board got replaced with new people, why even have a non-profit board if the CEO can just revert decisions and replace everyone on the board?
Are there special circumstances with the openAI board? For a normal company the board is supposed to represent the interests of investors. If investors ask for him back the board should comply. Who's interests are the OpenAI board representing?
> Are there special circumstances with the openAI board?
Yes, see below.
> Whose interests are the OpenAI board representing?
OpenAI has a weird charter which mandates the board to uphold a fiduciary duty not to the shareholders but rather to being "broadly beneficial". This is very uncommon. It means that the board is fiscally required to uphold safety above all else; if they don't, the board members could get sued. The most likely person to fund such a lawsuit would be Elon, who donated a lot of money to the non-profit side of OpenAI.
Here's the OpenAI page which explains this unique charter:
https://openai.com/our-structure Excerpt: “each director must perform their fiduciary duties in furtherance of its mission—safe AGI that is broadly beneficial”
Like skywhopper (see sibling comment below), I think that the news coverage of the situation was probably heavily biased by parties favorable to Altman who wanted to influence the negotiation. There is no evidence that the board tried to get Sam back. I suspect that the true extent of discussion on this topic was probably limited to the attempt to hire sam back by Mira Murati, who is not on the board.
They called Sam bluff, using the talk to bring him back just to get enough time to replace Mira. They made the decision to sacrifice OpenAI as it once was.
wait, wait, how do we know this? where are the receipts? so far it's just heavy duty PR artillery. he was fired, then allegedly there was a negotiation (with some strange already-passed "5PM deadline"), but we have no idea who initiated that and why (allegedly Satya), etc.
Yes but a large portion of this investment is in cloud credits, and they have control in some way on how these credits are spent + actual access to all dataset, flows, and source-code necessary to replicate the tech.
Nah, I would suspect all the press about “Altman being begged to come back” was likely planted, if not by Altman himself, then by investors seeking to pressure the board.
