Further confirmation of what I said 9 days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38373572) based on the NYT (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/technology/openai-altman-...) followed by WSJ (https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/altman-firing-openai-520a3a8c): the firing was over Sam Altman's attempt to takeover the board by firing one of the holdouts (Helen Toner), which would secure him a majority indefinitely (especially after packing the board further by filling vacancies), thereby neutering all remaining governance controls over Altman. In particular, in this piece, Altman acknowledges on the record that he was trying to fire Toner and went about it in a 'ham-fisted way'.
Excerpts:
"...Some members of the OpenAI board had found Altman an unnervingly slippery operator. For example, earlier this fall he’d confronted one member, Helen Toner, a director at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, at Georgetown University, for co-writing a paper that seemingly criticized OpenAI for “stoking the flames of AI hype.” Toner had defended herself (though she later apologized to the board for not anticipating how the paper might be perceived). Altman began approaching other board members, individually, about replacing her. When these members compared notes about the conversations, some felt that Altman had misrepresented them as supporting Toner’s removal. “He’d play them off against each other by lying about what other people thought”, the person familiar with the board’s discussions told me. “Things like that had been happening for years.” (A person familiar with Altman’s perspective said that he acknowledges having been “ham-fisted in the way he tried to get a board member removed”, but that he hadn’t attempted to manipulate the board.)
...His tactical skills were so feared that, when 4 members of the board---Toner, D’Angelo, Sutskever, and Tasha McCauley---began discussing his removal, they were determined to guarantee that he would be caught by surprise. “It was clear that, as soon as Sam knew, he’d do anything he could to undermine the board”, the person familiar with those discussions said...Two people familiar with the board’s thinking say that the members felt bound to silence by confidentiality constraints...But whenever anyone asked for examples of Altman not being “consistently candid in his communications”, as the board had initially complained, its members kept mum, refusing even to cite Altman’s campaign against Toner.
...The dismissed board members, meanwhile, insist that their actions were wise. “There will be a full and independent investigation, and rather than putting a bunch of Sam’s cronies on the board we ended up with new people who can stand up to him”, the person familiar with the board’s discussions told me. “Sam is very powerful, he’s persuasive, he’s good at getting his way, and now he’s on notice that people are watching.” Toner told me, “The board’s focus throughout was to fulfill our obligation to OpenAI’s mission.” (Altman has told others that he welcomes the investigation---in part to help him understand why this drama occurred, and what he could have done differently to prevent it.)
Some A.I. watchdogs aren’t particularly comfortable with the outcome. Margaret Mitchell, the chief ethics scientist at Hugging Face, an open-source A.I. platform, told me, “The board was literally doing its job when it fired Sam. His return will have a chilling effect. We’re going to see a lot less of people speaking out within their companies, because they’ll think they’ll get fired---and the people at the top will be even more unaccountable.”
Altman, for his part, is ready to discuss other things. “I think we just move on to good governance and good board members and we’ll do this independent review, which I’m super excited about”, he told me. “I just want everybody to move on here and be happy. And we’ll get back to work on the mission”."