So even if you maintain strict board control, the money people can still kick you out. Incredible!
There are no board that can prevent employees from leaving, nor should there.
It made it easy to sway employees to Altman's favor and pressure the board.
If the employees were not cohesive on Altman's side, he probably wouldn't be back...
There will be no OpenAI to begin with had that not been the case.
I don't really care much about the demise of OpenAI-the-nonprofit - I don't think it was ever a very promising approach to accomplishing its own goals, so I don't lament its failure all that much - but I feel like there is a kind of gaslighting going on, where people are trying to erase the history of the organization as a mission-oriented non-profit, and claim that it was always intended to be a wildly profitable product company, and that just isn't the case.
I don't buy the Q* talk.
I still think the board did what they thought was right (and maybe even was?), but not having the pulse of the company and their lack of operational experience was fatal.
Having said that, as there’s obviously a lot of money involved for all OpenAI employees (Microsoft offered very generous packages if they jumped ship), it can be said that money in the end is what people care a lot about.
However, as you note, Sam’s exit would have cost those employees at least high six figures, so I’m sure that reduced the amount of leverage required to extract signatures.
The fallout showed non-profit missions can't co-exist with for-profit incentives. And the power that investors were exerting, and employees (who would also benefit from the recent 70B round they were going to have) was too much.
And any disclaimer the investors got when investing in OpenAI was meaningless. It reportedly stated they would be wise in viewing their investment as charity, and they can potentially lose everything. And there was an AGI clause that said it will reconsider all financial arrangements, that Microsoft and other investors had when investing in the company was all worthless. Link to Wired article with interesting details -https://www.wired.com/story/what-openai-really-wants/
I know you're quoting the (now-gone) board member, but this is a ridiculous take. By this standard, Google should have dissolved in 2000 ("Congrats everyone, we didn't be evil!"). Doctors would go away too ("Primum non nocere -- you're all dismissed!").
They need employees to advance their stated mission.
> One of the comments a member made was, if the company was destroyed, it would still be consistent with serving the mission. Which is right.
I mean, that's a nice sound bite and everything, but the only scenario where blowing up the company seems to be consistent with their mission is the scenario where Open AI itself achieves a breakthrough in AGI and where the board thinks that system cannot be made safe. Otherwise, to be relevant in guiding research towards AGI, they need to stay a going concern, and that means not running off 90% of the employee base.
That's why they presumably agreed to find a solution. But at the same time shows that in essence, entities with for-profit incentives find a way to get what they want. There certainly needs to be more thought and discussion about governance, and how we collectively as a species or each company individually governs AI.
The silver lining is that this should clear the path to proper regulation, as it's now clear that this self-regulation approach was given a go, and just didn't work.
The misalignment is not accidental, it was carefully developed over the last few years.
I agree it's not that deep - they wanted to join a hypergrowth startup, build cool stuff, and get paid. If someone is rocking the boat, you throw them off the boat. No mission alignment needed! :)