I think it means that the Twitterverse got it wrong from the beginning. It wasn’t Ilya and his safety faction that did in OpenAI, it was Quora’s Adam D'Angelo and his competing Poe app. Ilya must have been successfully pressured and assured by Microsoft, but Adam must have held his ground.
Dang I completely forgot that D'Angelo and Quora have a product that directly competes with ChatGPT in the form of Poe.
Wouldn't that make this a conflict of interest, sitting on the board while running a competing product - and making a decision at the company he is on the board of to destroy said company and benefit his own product?
That certainly seems to be the scenario and explains his willingness to go scorched earth. I wonder what the motivations of the other 2 board members are. Could they just be burn it down AI Doomers?
He doesn't say that, but to me he does use a little weasel wording, the whole passive voice "regret my participation in", when to all accounts so far, it seems that he was one of the instigators, and quite possibly the actual instigator of all this.
"regret my participation" sounds much more like "going along with it".
Is this learning from your mistakes though? "Deeply regret" is one of those statements that does not really mean much. There are what something like 6 board members? Three of which are employees, two of those that got removed from the board. He was the only voting board member who is also an employee and part of the original founding team if you will. These are assumptions on my part but I don't really suspect the other board members orchestrated this event. Its possible and I may be wrong but it is improbable. So lets work off the narrative that he orchestrated the event. He now "Deeply regret" its, not a "I made a mistake" and I am sorry. But he regrets the participation and how it plays out.
The weasely part is when he appears to be defecting the blame to the board rather than accepting that he made a mistake. Even if the coup wasn't Ilya's idea in the first place, he was the lynchpin that made it possible.
Come on Ilya, step up and own it, as well as the consequences. Don't be a weasel.