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Comment by kmoser | Hacker News Reader

> Sam Altman crafts an elaborate non-profit structure but gets completely blindsided by the possibility of the board overthrowing them.

When you cede control to others, you open the possibility of them doing unexpected things. Why is this a surprise to the author?

> The board moves quickly to sack the CEO but then falls completely silent, thus almost intentionally losing the communication war.

That's not an example of things "not adding up." It's what happens when you either don't care, or are too incompetent, to fight that war.

> The board is made up seemingly random selection of people, one of them leading a potential OpenAI competitor.

Maybe those people have shown their trustworthiness and intentions in the past, and are considered more likely to be trustworthy in the future. In any case, they are far from a "random selection of people".

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> When you cede control to others, you open the possibility of them doing unexpected things. Why is this a surprise to the author?

It's not. The author is summarizing things that don't seem to make sense based on current info - i.e. the author wasn't surprised, but is wondering why Altman was.

Then the author doesn't really understand what's happening or isn't making much sense.

There isn't anything, as far as I can tell, structure specific that caused this ousting. If it was a normal for-profit structure with a board of directors this same event could have played out.

What is surprising to Sam, and any casual observer, is this looks to be a massive overstepping of the board. By all accounts it looks like Sam was excelling in his role, and to fire him for seemingly no reason with no real transition plan is incompetence and should be unexpected from any serious company.

My apologies - I don't really disagree with anything you're saying, but it's just not really relevant to the comment I was replying to (one in which the commenter apparently misunderstood the article).

And yet this point from the article seems to be something that the author (not Altman) was surprised by:

> Sam Altman says he wants to develop AI for the benefit of humanity yet at the first possible moment he sets up a deal that sells 49% of their endeavor to Microsoft.

Maybe Altman thought Microsoft would be the best way to fund the venture, while still benefiting humanity. It's not as if selling 49% to Microsoft will guarantee the venture won't succeed. Altman isn't omniscient; he's making his best possible moves based on his prediction of future, as we all do.

> the author wasn't surprised, but is wondering why Altman was.

I'm sure Altman wsn't surprised.

> The board is made up seemingly random selection of people, one of them leading a potential OpenAI competitor.

Does this refer to someone in particular?

Adam D'Angelo, who is primarily focused on Poe, a competitor to Sam's GPT store. From Adam's point of view, it would likely be hugely favorable for OpenAI to just be a research company providing APIs and for companies like Quora and Poe to focus on launching products based on those APIs.

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