From the board’s perspective ... will have a staffing problem ... those staff will probably be more enthusiastic about AI, generally, than the mission calls for.
From the staff’s perspective, the board is a bunch of outsiders ... driven by an abstract sense of mission. Which kind of is the job of a nonprofit board, but which will reasonably annoy the staff.
Yesterday virtually all of OpenAI’s staff signed an open letter to the board ... the letter claims that the board “informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed ‘would be consistent with the mission.’” Yes! I mean, the board might be wrong about the facts, but in principle it is absolutely possible that destroying OpenAI’s business would be consistent with its mission. If you have built an unsafe AI, you delete the code and burn down the building. The mission is conditional — build AGI if it is safe — and if the condition is not satisfied then you go ahead and destroy all of the work. That is the board’s job. It’s the board’s job because it can’t be the staff’s job, because the staff is there to do the work, and will be too conflicted to destroy it. The board is there to supervise the mission.