This comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of how OpenAI and most companies operate. The board is a check on power. In most companies they will have to approve of high level decisions: moving to a new office space or closing a new acquisition. But they have 0 day to day control. If they tell the CEO to fire these 10 people and he doesn’t do it, that’s it. They can’t do it themselves, they can’t tell the CEO’s underlings to do it. They have 0 options besides getting a new CEO. OpenAI’s board had less control even than this.
Tweeting “Altman is not following our directions and we don’t want to fire him, but we really want him to start doing what we ask” is a sure fire way to collapse your company and make you sound like a bunch of incompetent buffoons. It’s admitting that you won’t use the one tool that you actually do have. I’m certain the board threatened to fire Sam before this unless he made X changes. I’m certain Sam never made all of those X changes. Therefore they can either follow through on their threat or lose. Turns out following through on their threat was meaningless because Sam owns OpenAI both with tacit power and the corporate structure.
The board’s statement doesn’t mention them having made such a request to Altman which was denied, that’s a strong signal against things having played out that way.
This comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of how OpenAI and most companies operate. The board is a check on power. In most companies they will have to approve of high level decisions: moving to a new office space or closing a new acquisition. But they have 0 day to day control. If they tell the CEO to fire these 10 people and he doesn’t do it, that’s it. They can’t do it themselves, they can’t tell the CEO’s underlings to do it. They have 0 options besides getting a new CEO. OpenAI’s board had less control even than this.
Tweeting “Altman is not following our directions and we don’t want to fire him, but we really want him to start doing what we ask” is a sure fire way to collapse your company and make you sound like a bunch of incompetent buffoons. It’s admitting that you won’t use the one tool that you actually do have. I’m certain the board threatened to fire Sam before this unless he made X changes. I’m certain Sam never made all of those X changes. Therefore they can either follow through on their threat or lose. Turns out following through on their threat was meaningless because Sam owns OpenAI both with tacit power and the corporate structure.
From where do you get that certainty?
If they would have made those threats, why didn’t someone tell the New York Times journalists who were trying to understand what happened about it?
Why didn’t they say so when they fired him? It’s the kind of thing that’s easy to say to justify firing him.
The board’s statement doesn’t mention them having made such a request to Altman which was denied, that’s a strong signal against things having played out that way.