What the CEOs of OpenAI and the Board of a Silicon Valley Company would have hoped to achieve: An Intriguing Account

I spoke to someone who was familiar with the directors thinking and it seemed that they believed they were making sure the company develops Powerful Artificial Intelligence safely when they fired Altman. Keeping Microsoft and investors happy wasn’t a priority of theirs. In the view of directors Adam D’Angelo, Helen Toner, and Tasha McCauley—and Sutskever—Altman didn’t deal straight with them. Bottom line: The board no longer trusted Altman to pursue OpenAI’s mission. If the board can’t trust the CEO, how can it protect or even monitor progress on the mission?

Since the weekend, there have been many dramatic developments, including the attempt by Altman to be CEO, the ousting of Murati as CEO and the hiring of Brockman by Microsoft.

The org chart that mapped out the relationship looked like a future GPT might come up with, but Sutskever did not appreciate it. “We are the only company in the world which has a capped profit structure,” he admonished me. If you think that if we succeed really well, then the GPUs are going to take my job and your job and everyone’s jobs, it seems nice if that company would not make so much money. To make sure the profit-seeking part of the company does not shy away from their commitment to make sure that the artificial intelligence is kept under control, there is a board keeping an eye on things.

This would-be guardian of humanity is the same board that fired Sam Altman last Friday, saying that it no longer had confidence in the CEO because “he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.” Almost no one at the company were aware of the firing until just before it was made public. Microsoft CEO was not given advance notice. The four directors who are representing a majority of the board kicked Brockman off the board. Brockman quickly resigned.