He wasn't shutting down her academic freedom. However, if you're going to diss what your own company is doing and praise competitors, you probably shouldn't be on the board.
>During the call, Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, said the board was endangering the future of the company by pushing out Mr. Altman. This, he said, violated the members’ responsibilities.
>Ms. Toner disagreed. The board’s mission is to ensure that the company creates artificial intelligence that “benefits all of humanity,” and if the company was destroyed, she said, that could be consistent with its mission.
that would be true for a for-profit company where her fiduciary duty was to shareholders, but in this case, given the charter in question, not publicly criticizing the company would be more likely to be a breach of her fiduciary duty
> This person is too far gone. Life isn't a movie.
This comment is a credibility killer. "This person", as a member of the board of a non-profit, has a duty to keep the non-profit on mission, and even to call for its dissolution if that isn't possible.
How far should she go to fulfill her interpretation of that duty? Should she even commit crimes in order to keep the non-profit mission? There's 700+ employees that disagree with her interpretation of the company's mission, and yet she stubbornly maintains that hers is correct and that it's her duty to destroy the company (or even sell it to Anthropic) to fulfill her duty.
This is delusion, and she thinks she's some hero that's saving the world by keeping it a non-profit when in reality it's just creating needless chaos and even impacting innocent people's livelihoods.
probably not, but continuing to publish research papers of the kind that got her the job in the first place seems reasonable maybe
but that's what altman was criticizing her for, not for committing crimes, which as far as anyone knows she hasn't done
> There's 700+ employees that disagree with her interpretation
maybe, maybe not, but the standard way that nonprofits and other companies work is that the employees do what the management tells them, the management does what the board tells them, and the board does what the shareholders or the charter tells them, and in all cases, if they refuse, they get fired
if you're an employee at the american cancer society and you decide that malaria in africa is a more important cause, you probably shouldn't expect to be able to continue using the acs's assets to fight malaria in africa. it might happen, but you shouldn't be at all surprised if you get fired
Again, who's stopping her from publishing research papers? She felt threatened and decided to retaliate by orchestrating firing Sam.
They likely violated RICO by essentially nuking the company's valuation and trying to sell to Anthropic. That is a crime, by the way, so they don't seem above that.
They haven't given even a clear reason for firing Sam. "Not being candid" with no evidence doesn't sound like it directly violates "the charter", but you can really argue anything when you're just "interpreting" the charter.
Anyway, you can make infinite excuses for their actions and justify them infinite ways. Hopefully you agree that the current situation is a giant mess, and it's caused by their narrow misguided interpretation of their job, and it's at the expense of basically everybody else.
She has a legally binding charter (well, assuming OpenAI's charter actually holds up in court, which we may end up seeing as the next logical step in the drama) to use board powers to further the non-profit mission. She does not have a legally binding obligation to commit crimes.
> A board member cannot sabotage their own company.
Criticism (especially valid criticism) is not sabotage, and in any case the board's responsibility is to advance the charter, not to support the (non-profit) company regardless of what it's doing.
There is a difference between independent from an organization, and someone that takes a public stand against a company. Reading that paper, which I am not really impressed with, they are taking a stance that openai's current trajectory is not as good as a competitor. I bet that if a Microsoft board member wrote a paper how Google search is better than Bing / AWS Better than Azure / OSX better than Windows they would be reprimanded also.
A comparison to another nonprofit would make more sense. A board member of the Komen Foundation being reprimanded for pointing out that other nonprofits are far more effective at helping cancer research would be a better comparison.
You seem to be fundamentally misunderstanding the role of non-executive board members.
In many cases they're industry experts / academics and in many cases those academics continue to publish papers that look objectively at the actions of all companies in their sphere of influence, including the one they're on the board of.
It's _expected_ for them to publish this type of material. It's literally their job. Cheerleading is for the C-suite.
They've admitted that they think it would be better to destroy open AI than to continue on its path, but how can an organization uphold its goals if it doesn't exist?
Imo you have to commit to working within an organization if you're on its board, you can't burn it down from within. I think it's less of an issue to try to remove the CEO if you don't agree with the direction they're taking, but this was obviously done in a sloppy manner in this case, and their willingness to destroy it makes me distrust them (not that my opinion matters per se).
I don't think it was done in a sloppy manner, I think there's a huge amount of spin and froth being generated to make it _look_ like it was done in a sloppy manner, but the reality is that the board took an executive action, released a discreet and concisely worded press release and then fell silent, which is 100% professional behaviour.
To me it's the other side that are acting sloppily, they're thrashing around like maniacs, they're obviously calling in favours behind the scenes as supportive articles are popping up all over the place, apparently employees were calling other employees in the middle of the night urging them to sign the 'I'll quit unless' letter, employees have been fed a misleading narrative (two of them, actually) about why the action was taken in the first place which riled them up...
I have to assume here that the board - as they're the ones acting professionally - similarly acted professionally before the firing and discussed the matter at great length and only resorted to this last minute firing because of exigent circumstances. The fact that a fired employee was able to cajole/bluff/whatever his way back into the office to prove some sort of point suggests that the board's action may have been necessary. What exactly was done during that time in the office, one might ask? Were systems accessed? Surely it was an unauthorised entry and a major security violation.
You do see that that action (re-entering the office after being fired) gives off lunatic vibes, don't you? Maybe it really did come down to 'yeah you're technically my boss but I'm gonna do whatever the hell I want and there's nothing you can do about it because everyone loves me' to which the board's only possible course of action is to fire immediately.
I don't think Sam cajoled their way and talked to the employees, as I understand it Ilya talked with the staff and revealed what they claimed were the reasons for the firing.
I just find the whole thing weird. I just think it seems unlikely that a board would decide something then about-face so rapidly as to have a meeting at the office the next day. It would be conventional for further meetings to take place at the offices of lawyers, for example.
It would also be normal for the non-fired members of staff to be instructed to have no further contact with the fired person without legal counsel present.
Sometimes it seems very much like everyone here is really playing to the cameras in a big way.
that does seem to be what altman was attempting: he wanted to have the cake of independent board members, but eat it by having them never express any opinions contrary to his own
her independence from openai was the nominal reason she was asked to supervise it in the first place, wasn't it