I have to assume that the individuals involved are under a mix of social and legal pressure to not talk about the circumstances.
I don't know how anyone can call the board's action a "coup." Calling it that seems to be a propagandistic abuse of the term.
The board was in charge, and it's not a coup if it fires a subordinate (the CEO). If anything, the coup was getting the board ousted.
The GP was pretty clear that he thought "the entire board decided to do a coup," which does not fit that interpretation.
But even the scenario you describe isn't something that can be properly described as a "coup." In that case, the employees are just appealing to a legitimate higher authority, which is a totally OK thing to do (e.g. it's not wrong to report a bribe-taking boss to the company ethics hotline). IMHO, a coup is where subordinates illegitimately usurp and depose the highest authority from below.
I don't think invoking a higher power necessarily makes it not a coup. To me, a coup is when you angle to relieve someone from office above you by any means. But reasonable people can disagree on that, I suppose.
>The board was in charge, and it's not a coup if it fires a subordinate (the CEO). If anything, the coup was getting the board ousted.
The CEO was a member of the board and the ones that fired the CEO also fired the Chairman of the Board, so the board went from 6 to 4. So far there's been even less of an explanation for the firing of the Chairman of the Board - who they offered to let remain as a regular employee - than there has been for Altman, though I see the removal of the Chairman as potentially the most egregious and coup-like.
Why do we have voting in board and democracy in the first place if one cannot use it for its intended use case without the fear of retaliation?
They clearly could have been more transparent, but it still does not make it as coup.
If you think so - that is why populism is considered as threat for democracy.
However, by trying to do so swiftly and not allowing him a chance to retaliate they pissed off Microsoft and the employees. At that point, they were basically forced to reinstate him or the entire company would collapse — and if they do that, they can't also go on record clarifying why he's bad.
* this is my vague recollection based on reading past discussions. I'm on my phone right now and unfortunately don't have any sources I can link, take this with a grain of salt.
Edit: a few links
That was my guess... but only because it was the only scenario I could think of where the board being curiously and obviously intentionally vague about 'why' in the announcement, but still saying more than nothing, made sense.
Board’s job is to hire or fire CEO. Technically CEO made the coup since he managed to throw his bosses out of their positions.
https://time.com/6342827/ceo-of-the-year-2023-sam-altman/
At least, that was how I felt after reading it.
Basically, within the span of a year, OpenAI transformed from a research lab inside a non-profit that was pursuing a seemingly-Quixiotic dream of artificial general intelligence (AGI)... into one of the fastest-growing for-profit software companies of all time via its creation of the chat-based generative AI category (aka ChatGPT) and its consumer/enterprise SaaS and API offerings.
The board -- or, at least, its 4 remaining non-CEO members -- thought that this was too much, too fast, and too soon, and that there was a narrow window of time where they could slow things down and refocus on the original non-profit mission. They also felt that Altman was a bit of a force of nature, had his own ideas about where OpenAI was going, and treated "board management" as one of his CEO skills to route around obstacles.
Once a board loses trust of their CEO, unfortunately, there is usually only one blunt and powerful tool left: firing the CEO.
And this happens pretty often. As the investor Jerry Neumann once put it, "Your board of directors is probably going to fire you."[1] Boards have very few ways to actually take action when they are worried about a company or institution; firing management is one of the few "course correction" actions they can take quickly.
In OpenAI's case, if they had a for-profit board, that board would probably have been ecstatic with Altman and the company's progress. But this was not a for-profit board. It was a non-profit (mission-oriented) board meant to oversee the safe rollout of AGI. Those board members weren't sure the best way to do that was to become one of the world's largest for-profit software companies.
I'd speculate that it was probably an emotional decision and the full implications were not entirely thought through until it was too late. I'd also speculate that this explains why Ilya Sutskever felt some immediate regret, because his goal wasn't to destroy OpenAI (or inspire an employee revolt) but to put its non-profit mission back into focus. I like to practice the principle of charity[2], and, in this case, I think the non-profit board was not acting maliciously but simply did not realize the knock-on effects of trying to replace a CEO when everything at the company seems to be "going right."
I suspect Altman thought the best way to roll out AI was via iterative product development and fast revenue growth to finance the GPU demands, utilizing corporate partnerships (Microsoft), viral word-of-mouth marketing, and SaaS/API fees (ChatGPT). Running out of data center compute started to become a primary concern, so it wouldn't surprise me if safety took a backseat to this. Remember, all this growth happened in the span of a year. Perhaps Altman thought he was satisfying the safety concerns simply by talking to regulators, making iterative releases, and going on a speaking tour about it, but the board thought the only way to go safely was to go slower. I'm sure we'll learn more after some books are written about the episode.
[1]: https://reactionwheel.net/2021/11/your-boards-of-directors-i...
Things would have played out very differently if the board was more experienced and thoughtful. Their hearts might have been in the right place, but their actions were reckless and ultimately backfired.
I think the old board came out of this looking even worse, but that doesn't mean Altman ended up better off than if he had managed things better from the start.
What should they have done to accomplish their goal?
So the board did this. They jumped the gun - this extreme move might have become justified at a later point in time, but definitely not yet. In a pedestrian understanding of game theory typical of AI doomsday cult members, the board failed to anticipate that other actors may not agree with their interpretation of reality, and perform their own actions in response. This response largely boiled down to scattering the institutional knowledge of OpenAI to the winds, in their eyes greatly exacerbating the safety concerns that led to firing Altman in the first place.
Altman, meanwhile, as a strong believer in OpenAI's mission, attempted to salvage the situation by brokering a deal to transfer OpenAI's institutional knowledge to Microsoft.
After having their shitty options explained to them - exacerbate a potential safety risk by seeding 750 new AI companies, leave control of the situation to Microsoft's board or step down and retain control under the OpenAI non-profit, they folded like a wet paper bag. The whole saga was a waste of their board seats and influence on humanity's first deployment of AGI. They all got the outcome that their competence deserved.
>"No one has explained how or why the entire board decided to do a coup ..."
To which I responded that there was in fact a very recent and relevant update to this. Your opinion on whether she belonged on the board is completely irrelevant to this fact and also childish.