this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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The outpouring of unprompted employee support speaks more to me than anything else and puts me firmly in Altman's camp. I can only think of a few bosses I've had in my life who would that reaction from their teams under these circumstances.
The reason the board have given is - if true - a very reasonable reason to fire a CEO. The job of the board is to oversee, scrutinise and challenge the management, and if the management were lying to or withholding information from the board then that's an obvious reason for the management to go.
American corporate governance standards are really hit-and-miss, and in a lot of these tech firms you often end up with situations of CEOs doubling up as chairs of their boards - e.g. Musk, Zuckerberg , Bezos -something that structurally neuters the ability of the board to do its basic job of challenging the CEO! So when I see an American board standing up to a CEO that's trying to evade scrutiny, I feel that's something that should be applauded.
Sure.. but they didn't just fire the CEO. They also fired a third of the board members including the chair of the board. And they did it with zero notice, zero discussion, just "You're out. k-cya-bai".
And then they fired their interim CEO a day later.
Yes, they have the right to do all of that... but they need a bloody good reason. In this case the reason was so insignificant they seriously considered changing their mind and reinstating everyone. WTF.
This board is now learning why normal boards typically acquiesce aggressively to the CEO, or at least the investors. Clearly they didn't realize the amount of political capital Altman had and while they were well within their rights according to the rules and the charter of the company to do what they did, they're now bearing the full brunt of the backlash from the entire Silicon Valley investment community. You can tell from his twitter feed that Ilya is now running on pure emotion. I'm sure he's been given the "you'll never work in this town again" speech.
https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028
I've got a solution. Why don't the employees control the company? Fuck this nonsense of the employees liking the old CEO or whatever. How about we make them democracies. What a concept!
I believe one of the worst possible timelines for the average human is one where for-profit capitalist entities control access to AGI and horde all the benefits accrued from it. OpenAI was founded specifically to avoid this - with a complicated governance structure designed to ensure true AGI would end up owned by humanity with the benefits shared by all.
The OpenAI board and top researchers made a desperate bid to prioritize safety over profits, and even with that elaborate governance structure behind them capitalism still seems to have found a way to fuck us.
Today we saw Satya Nadella and Sam Altman steer humanity further from a possible utopia and closer to.... Cyberpunk 2077.
Good luck everyone!
More like, "It's been an honor serving with you!"