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Comment by khazhoux | Hacker News Reader

An "Independent" board is supposed to be a good thing, right?

Doesn't this clown show show that if a board has no skin in the game --apart from reputation-- they have no incentive to keep the company alive?

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I think it more shows that the blend of profit/nonprofit was a failure.

I think this was a unique situation due to timing. OpenAI had 9 board members at the beginning of the year, but 3 (Reid Hoffman, Shivon Zilis, and Will Hurd) had to leave for various reasons (e.g. conflict of interest, which IMO should have also taken D'Angelo off the board), and this would have never happened if they were still on the board. So you were left with a rare situation where the board was incredibly immature/inexperienced for the importance of OpenAI.

It has been reported that Altman was working on increasing the size of the board again, so it's reasonable to think that some of the board members saw this as their "now or never" moment, for whatever reason.

> Shivon Zilis

Is that the same person who had kids with Elon. Did Elon put her on the Open AI board as his proxy.

> Is that the same person who had kids with Elon.

Yes.

> Did Elon put her on the Open AI board as his proxy.

No, or at least Elon was already off the board when Shivon was elevated to board member: https://loeber.substack.com/p/a-timeline-of-the-openai-board

The issue was getting nobodies on the board who don’t have experience sitting on boards or working with startups. It’s very evident by how this was handled.

They may well have skin in the game, but not this game. That's exactly why you don't want a board member with a potential conflict of interest.

It shows nonprofit boards wield outsize power and need strict governance, e.g., conflicts of interest, empty board seats.

All of which should have been covered in the paperwork.

Hence the need for strict governance. I can't think of another board with so many board seats empty, to say nothing about conflicts of interest.

That's another item, actually. When there are a lot of vacancies on the board you don't make controversial decisions if you can avoid them for fear of being seen as acting without sufficient support for the decision. Especially not if those decisions have the potential to utterly wreck the thing you are supposed to be governing.

Shareholders check the power of corporate boards, unlike nonprofit ones, so not a surprise.

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