OpenAI board stands firm in face of staff revolt over Sam Altman's ouster | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI board stands firm in face of staff revolt over Sam Altman's ouster

ft.com

45 pointstomduncalf52 comments

From: https://twitter.com/geoffreyirving/status/172675427761849141...

Geoffrey Irving @geoffreyirving: Third, my prior is strongly against Sam after working for him for two years at OpenAI:

1. He was always nice to me. 2. He lied to me on various occasions 3. He was deceptive, manipulative, and worse to others, including my close friends (again, only nice to me, for reaso

Seeing a few of these types of accounts. Something tells me more is going to come out about the why. I still think it’s a mistake to assume rational people would act completely irrationally

Assuming people to act rationally can really bite you hard. Life experience has taught that people are mostly irrational beings with occasional rational episodes.

I get that but to assume a board of very smart, competent people would just up and fire a highly respected CEO for no reason when it seemed like they were destined to be enormously successful and right after a well received keynote seems strange to me when it’s the least likely scenario if you just consider the facts that we all know to be true.

It's a mistake to claim to confidently know anything at this point. But if the board has some secret reason that makes them look good, I really struggle to understand why they wouldn't have leaked it to the media yet. It's too late for the truth to come out if half your company has already left, and the best people are going to be lining up offers, like, today.

That is very confusing to be sure but the explanations I’ve heard to this point that people are speculating on make absolutely zero sense. The board would fire him to protect a board member’s competing product? Why? Multiple people given the same project? What?

I’m not going to speculate why they would withhold any commentary this long because I have no idea but nothing about this adds up and calls for an alternate explanation. Remember that a lot of people have wagered their own reputations on Altman and so have a great interest in him coming out on top.

This is important because it comes from someone who has first-hand knowledge and can talk freely (caveats notwithstanding).

It matches my gut feeling; Sam Altman has always seemed deceptive and manipulative to me. This is based on a general impression and as such, isn't worth much or anything at all -- but I would be surprised if something doesn't eventually come up that shows a real dark side of him.

> if something doesn't eventually come up that shows a real dark side of him.

Harvesting (scans of) eyeballs of poor people makes him look extremely bad to me, but it seems like many people are happy to pretend that the ongoing worldcoin crypto eyeball scam never happened.

Yeah, that is absolutely horrible. But not the same kind of deception. It's horrible because it consists of preying on the vulnerable. But it's not exactly fraud.

Both can be true though: Altman can be a jerk and the board can be out of line with the firing and subsequent handling of the fall-out. Plenty of blame to go around here.

This certainly doesn’t make Sam Altman look good either: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the... and on the other hand Altman is liked by reporters: https://twitter.com/teddyschleifer/status/172664422600670052....

Eh, at this point are there any successful people that don't have these 'qualities'? We raise our children with stories about great men and fair leaders, when reality is nothing of the sort.

Interesting. If Ilya already signed the letter and wants to bring Sam back, who else on that board has enough power to resist? And early reports said Ilya was the main force too. So apparently he was played and used as a scapegoat for the real mastermind(s?).

This drama is incredible. If someone had written a fiction like this, I would have called it a very imaginative but cliched and unrealistic story. Nobody that high on the "smart" hierarchy would do something this dumb. But now it is reality... I don't know if I should be sad or amused.

It's possible he was played. But fact of the matter is that now after the 'coup', the board has been reduced to 4 from the prior 6.

All 4 were against Sam, now Ilya has switched allegiance. So it's still 3-1. 2 more board members would have to turn to bring Sam back.

At this point, I think it's safe to say that all 3 remaining members are still against bringing back Sam - or at least 2 of them staunchly are.

They'd have to if only to protect their own hide. Bringing Sam back would work against them immediately. But the board as it is is dysfunctional, and that can't be allowed to stand either.

At this point I’m assuming the employees signing the letter are aware of enough details to decided whether or not Sam did something so wrong he should have been fired. With this many employees siding with Sam, I can’t imagine this looks good if any of this goes to a jury in the lawsuits that follow.

Pretty sure most employees would take the side of whatever seems likely to increases the value of their equity the most. Not sure if it's much of a signal either way on whether he 'did something wrong' or not

There is a separate article on the front page from Bloomberg claiming employees were told that Altman had (1) given the same project task to two different teams, and (2) gave opposing feedback to different board members about the same person. I have no idea how either of these was supposed to justify the ousting.

I've every confidence in Sam's return. With the entire staff and Microsoft behind him, how can he fail?

I think that’s a mistaken assumption. Altman has been immediately held in high regard as the injured party and everyone has dogpiled on the board for being stupid. Lower level employees likely are not privy to the details at this point and are just subscribing to group think, a completely rational behavior.

But the longer this goes on with radio silence from the board in the face of massive pressure, the more likely I believe it is that something detrimental to Altman’s character is going to come out that’s going to make the decision seem like the obvious one and suddenly Nadella won’t look like such a genius.

In the age of Elizabeth Holmes, Adam Neumann, SBF and Trevor Milton I’m surprised there aren’t more people just a tad distrusting.

Nadella's attitude is adding mystery to mystery. It's hard to think he doesn't know the truth. Or did Sam tell him a story, nice but fake, and he believed it? That would be spectacular.

He may have no choice but to try to play this card at this point? The stakes are pretty high I suppose. You don't just give up such level of potential control over this tech.

There are multiple pieces emerging here and there which paint Mr Altman as deceptive including https://twitter.com/geoffreyirving/status/172675427761849141... https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the... and the OpenAI board statement as well.

Yet Mr Nadella stands with Mr. Altman.

What if he thinks his position and company is so strong it can withstand any web of deceit Altman can weave? There is, after all, so much money to be made here it matters even on a Microsoft scale.

I think that’s easily explained by how levered Microsoft is to OpenAI/Altman. Microsoft would likely suffer hundreds of billions of market cap destruction as well as major reputation damage if this partnership collapsed and on a personal level Nadella would very possibly have to step down, giving him even more reason to want this to succeed.

I think people are so tempted to contrive these multilevel conspiracy theories where Nadella and Altman are thinking many moves ahead while the board is just a slow moving group of idiots when the much simpler explanation is they are desperately trying to restore confidence. I think the main tell on this besides what was already said was Nadella making the announcement before market open- this is a guy feeling major pressure from shareholders about the strategy.

The problem with that though is that he is making impulsive decisions with imperfect information and taking major reputation risk in the process.

There must be some (legal) way to get rid of D'angelo? If severe conflict of interest is not enough, his threatening to destroy the livelihood of almost all employees should remove his board immunity ... somehow?

It is very interesting that nobody so far has brought suit. Either they believe the myth of the infallible board members operating without oversight or they too have skeletons in their closets that they do not want to come out during discovery.

HN’s “don’t change the title” rule presumably applies here - don’t rephrase British English from a British newspaper into American English. It’s “ousting”, not “ouster”.

(Unless the FT is serving different headlines to different IPs?)

In the U.S., I get "ousting" from ft.com.

Yes, it's serving differently depending on IP (or browser preference?). In Poland I see "ousting" as well, but Archive.ph and Archive.org both have "ouster": https://archive.ph/c1kr0

That’s pretty neat on the FT’s part.

UK here, 1 hour later and neither "ouster" nor "ousting". I see: "OpenAI’s future hangs in balance amid standoff between staff and board"

I didn’t know that was a BrE/AmE distinction. It’s a very bizarre one.

Tangentially, I had never seen the term “ouster” before this week. To someone used to British English it grates horribly. I saw an explanation somewhere that it is because it’s of French origin, but it doesn’t make it stick out any less.

There’s a few others that we accept as normal in British English: merger, disclaimer, retainer. They all seem to be vaguely legalistic in usage.

I think we may have read the same article! Or maybe a comment on here :)

The regional difference in the title is an interesting application of geolocation imo.

"Don't change the title" is an interesting rule anyway for a site that has an automatic title changer that you can't escape, and where you can regularily watch posted titles change like 5 times until they have nothing to do with the original title (but the correct spin for the sensitive HN crowd).

I mean, they have no equity, they didn't create it. They don't really lose anything if OpenAI disappears. Just fewer meetings they have to go to.

If they didn't like board meetings they wouldn't be there in the first place. Their reputation is on the line. It's arguably more important to them than money.

I think the reputation ship has sailed at this point. I wouldn’t expect them to be invited to join any more boards.

And to be removed from any other boards where they hold seats if any.

Wow kinda respect them testing staffs willingness to quit.

The juicy tender is fueling a lot of the motivation here, more than any loyalty or preference to Altman

"As long-term investors, we would value companies on their customers, deep partnerships, talent and long-term defensible moat,” he said. “Where does that all sit today with OpenAI?”

A parson gone to the bad, still wearing the robes and collar. But no man is damned for eternity until the devil claims him for his own. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

https://archive.is/c1kr0

https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clea...

As a follow-up to the most upvoted comment in the previous thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38353330), Dustin Moskovitz said it was totally false: https://www.threads.net/@moskov/post/Cz482XgJBN0?hl=en. Listening to random HN commentators might not be a good idea.

At this point, it's becoming clear that the remaining board members aren't competent to run a lemonade stand let alone sit on the board of OpenAI. They don't have the best interests of the company, its mission, or its employees anywhere on their priorities. Their blasé attitude toward destroying an $80bn company, throwing the lives of its 700+ employees into complete chaos, and giving customers and investors the finger without any public statements is proof of that.

Non-profit org man. We still don't know what happened and their actions might align to their mission. Weird how quite a few people with your narrative mistake it for a for-profit company.

I fully understand the nature of the org. I just don't see how destroying it does anything but hurt its mission. Weird how quite a few people with your narrative always project false assumptions onto others.

[Deleted a comment with the text content of the article. Article can be found on archive.ph.]

Perhaps you shouldn't post the entire content of the FT article here? Archive.ph helps avoid direct copyright infringement :)

ah I see, ok I’ll try to delete the comment

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