I’ve read your explanations of what happened, and it still seems like the board acted extremely incompetently. Call me an armchair general if you want. Specific choices that I take severe issue with:
The decision to fire Sam, instead of just ejecting him from the board
Both kicking Sam off the board, and firing him, and kicking Greg off at the same time all at once with no real explanation is completely unnecessary and is also what ultimately gives Sam the cassus belli for organizing the revolt to begin with. It’s also unnecessary to defend Helen from Sam’s attacks.
Consider what happens if Sam had just lost his board seat. First, his cost-benefit analysis looks different: Sam still has most of what he had before to lose, namely his actual position at OpenAI, and so probably no matter how mad he is he doesn’t hold the entire organization hostage.
Second, he is way, way more limited in what he can justifiably publicly do in response. Taking the nuclear actions he did—quitting in protest and moving to Microsoft—in response to losing control over a board he shouldn’t have control over in the first place would look disloyal and vindictive. And if/when Sam tries to use his position as CEO to sabotage the company or subvert the board further (this time lacking his own seat), you’ll have more ammunition to fire him later if you really need to.
If I had been on the board, my first action after getting the five together is to call Greg and Mira into an office and explain what was going on. Then after a long conversation about our motivations (whether or not they’d agreed with our decision), I immediately call Sam in/over the internet and deliver the news that he is no longer a board member, and that the vote had already been passed. I then overtly and clearly explain the reasoning behind why he’s losing the board seat (“we felt you were trying to compromise the integrity of the board with your attacks on Helen and playing of board members against one another”), in front of everybody present. If it’s appropriate, I give him the opportunity to save face and say that he voluntarily resigned to keep the board independent. Even if he doesn’t go quietly, in this setting he’s pretty much incapable of pulling any of the shenanigans he did over that weekend, and key people will know the surface reason of why he’s being ejected and will interpret his next moves in that light.
The decision never to explain why they ejected Sam.
Mindboggling. You can’t just depose the favored leader of the organization and not at least lie in a satisfying way about why you did it. People were desperate to know why the board fired him and to believe it was something beyond EA affiliation. Which it was! So just fucking say that, and once you do now it’s on Sam to prove or disprove your accusations. People, I’d wager even people inside OpenAI who feel some semblance of loyalty to him, did not actually need that much evidence to believe that Sam Altman—Silicon Valley’s career politician—is a snake and was trying to corrupt the organization he was a part of. Say you have private information, explain precisely the things you explain in the above comment. That’s way better than saying nothing because if you say nothing then Sam gets to explain what you did instead.
The decision not to be aggressive in denouncing Sam after he started actively threatening to destroy the company.
Beyond communicating the motivation behind the initial decision, the board (Ilya ideally, if you can get him to do this) should have been on Twitter the entire time screaming at the top of their lungs that Sam’s was willing to burn the entire company down in service of his personal ambitions, and that while kicking Sam off the board was a tough call and much tears were shed, everything that happened over the last three days—destroying all of your hard-earned OpenAI equity and handing it to MIcrosoft etc. - was a resounding endorsement of their decision to fire him, and that they will never surrender, etc. etc. etc. The only reason Sam’s strategies of feeding info to the press about his inevitable return worked in the first place was because the board stayed completely fucking silent the entire time and refused to give any hint as to what they were thinking to either the staff at OpenAI or the general public.
I’ve read your explanations of what happened, and it still seems like the board acted extremely incompetently. Call me an armchair general if you want. Specific choices that I take severe issue with:
The decision to fire Sam, instead of just ejecting him from the board
Both kicking Sam off the board, and firing him, and kicking Greg off at the same time all at once with no real explanation is completely unnecessary and is also what ultimately gives Sam the cassus belli for organizing the revolt to begin with. It’s also unnecessary to defend Helen from Sam’s attacks.
Consider what happens if Sam had just lost his board seat. First, his cost-benefit analysis looks different: Sam still has most of what he had before to lose, namely his actual position at OpenAI, and so probably no matter how mad he is he doesn’t hold the entire organization hostage.
Second, he is way, way more limited in what he can justifiably publicly do in response. Taking the nuclear actions he did—quitting in protest and moving to Microsoft—in response to losing control over a board he shouldn’t have control over in the first place would look disloyal and vindictive. And if/when Sam tries to use his position as CEO to sabotage the company or subvert the board further (this time lacking his own seat), you’ll have more ammunition to fire him later if you really need to.
If I had been on the board, my first action after getting the five together is to call Greg and Mira into an office and explain what was going on. Then after a long conversation about our motivations (whether or not they’d agreed with our decision), I immediately call Sam in/over the internet and deliver the news that he is no longer a board member, and that the vote had already been passed. I then overtly and clearly explain the reasoning behind why he’s losing the board seat (“we felt you were trying to compromise the integrity of the board with your attacks on Helen and playing of board members against one another”), in front of everybody present. If it’s appropriate, I give him the opportunity to save face and say that he voluntarily resigned to keep the board independent. Even if he doesn’t go quietly, in this setting he’s pretty much incapable of pulling any of the shenanigans he did over that weekend, and key people will know the surface reason of why he’s being ejected and will interpret his next moves in that light.
The decision never to explain why they ejected Sam.
Mindboggling. You can’t just depose the favored leader of the organization and not at least lie in a satisfying way about why you did it. People were desperate to know why the board fired him and to believe it was something beyond EA affiliation. Which it was! So just fucking say that, and once you do now it’s on Sam to prove or disprove your accusations. People, I’d wager even people inside OpenAI who feel some semblance of loyalty to him, did not actually need that much evidence to believe that Sam Altman—Silicon Valley’s career politician—is a snake and was trying to corrupt the organization he was a part of. Say you have private information, explain precisely the things you explain in the above comment. That’s way better than saying nothing because if you say nothing then Sam gets to explain what you did instead.
The decision not to be aggressive in denouncing Sam after he started actively threatening to destroy the company.
Beyond communicating the motivation behind the initial decision, the board (Ilya ideally, if you can get him to do this) should have been on Twitter the entire time screaming at the top of their lungs that Sam’s was willing to burn the entire company down in service of his personal ambitions, and that while kicking Sam off the board was a tough call and much tears were shed, everything that happened over the last three days—destroying all of your hard-earned OpenAI equity and handing it to MIcrosoft etc. - was a resounding endorsement of their decision to fire him, and that they will never surrender, etc. etc. etc. The only reason Sam’s strategies of feeding info to the press about his inevitable return worked in the first place was because the board stayed completely fucking silent the entire time and refused to give any hint as to what they were thinking to either the staff at OpenAI or the general public.