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Comment by rmbyrro | Hacker News Reader

Not the "money people", but the extremely bad way they removed Altman, I think.

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...

Yeah, I think this was "700 out of 730 employees signed a letter saying they'd quit, over a holiday weekend". OpenAI with no employees is not worth a whole lot.

This episode taught us the very obvious lesson that if you hire people incentivized by equity growth, it is not possible to take steps that detrimentally impact equity growth, without losing all those people. The board had already lost the moment it allowed hundreds of fat compensation packages to be signed.

> lost the moment it allowed hundreds of fat compensation packages to be signed.

There will be no OpenAI to begin with had that not been the case.

Maybe maybe not. There certainly wouldn't have been the version of OpenAI that runs a massively successful and profitable AI product company. But reading the OpenAI charter, it's pretty clear that running a massively successful AI product company was never a necessary component of the organization; and indeed, as we just saw, is actually a conflict of interest with the organization's charter.

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.

Do we know the real reason they tried kicking him out yet?

By abrupt way it was carried, it gives me the impression it was a conflict of personalities.

I don't buy the Q* talk.

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