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Comment by stubish | Hacker News Reader

Now I'm curious as to the reasoning Sam got back in. The board is there for a purpose and has legal duties. Did they have some duty to cave in when the company was threatened, overriding their oversight duties that caused them to sack Sam in the first place? Did they decide they just got it wrong? It seems pretty wobbly, and makes me question if boards are useful at all for many companies in today's world (and what other structure could protect shareholder interests, when the majority shareholders are passive investment funds?)

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It's because of Satya.

He offered to move Sam and whoever supported him under the Microsoft wing with an independent for-profit company with the same access to unlimited compute that they needed to train their models.

With this looming over their heads the employees/shareholders ultimately had to choose between (a) staying at OpenAI without Sam, having the company lose their deal with Microsoft and likely folding, (b) moving to Microsoft with Sam or (c) allowing Sam to come back.

And now it looks like they will fold under Sam and Microsoft still will be able to scoop up the talent and tech.

The Matt Levine column on "Who Controls OpenAI?" becomes more and more relevant each day.

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/mergers-and-acquisitions/matt-...

It looks like he made a bunch of people dance, not just Google...

Also because Altman’s deal with microsoft allowed them the IP to really take everything if this happened, rather than starting from scratch as a new company/division.

Financial rewards. Money.

Investors could not take the risk of disturbing the value of their investment.

It is that simple

If your fiduciary duty is to "humanity" or whatever this board's is/was, then it could make sense to conclude that duty is better fulfilled by keeping Altman under your watch, even with your powers much diminished, than by letting him go to Microsoft.

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