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Comment by YeBanKo | Hacker News Reader

I like your idea. But I think it is much simpler: money. Someone called him and offered insane amount of money to sell the company. He told them to fuck off and did not inform the board about the offer. Or maybe he refused a very lucrative contract without consulting the board.

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It is interesting to see so many people believing that Sam is the altruistically motivated one, and the board is hungry for money. It's understandable, 'board of directors' is typically associated with faceless greed. But in this instance, it seems more likely that Sam would be ousted for selling integrity for profit, than for rejecting profit for integrity.

Of course, we don't really know yet.

It sounds like this was the issue. Even Elon Musk, for all his flaws, strongly disagreed with the direction of 'open'AI.

Ilya siding with the board and the board having no financial interests leads me to think that Sam was hiding things/making decisions that kept leading the org away from its initial mission.

We'll probably learn in the future what really happened.

It’s not about altruism. He might have wanted a different thing. If he is well set financially for himself, he may want to build AGI or advance AI further. Others may want to have some sort of an exit for the company or invest more into building SaaS AI platform.

"The majority of the board is independent, and the independent directors do not hold equity in OpenAI."

It does not matter. They have fiduciary duty in the interest of the company's mission. Maybe Altman wanted to monetize the company in a way that board deemed not aligned with their mission.

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