If actually enforcing the charter leads to them being immediately disempowered, it‘s not worth anything in the first place.
If you pushed for fire sprinklers to be installed, then yell “FIRE”, and turn on the fire sprinklers, causing a bunch of water damage, and then refuse to tell anyone where you thought the fire was and why you thought that, I don’t think you should be too surprised when people contemplate taking away your ability to trigger the fire sprinklers.
Keep in mind that the announcement was not something like
After careful consideration and strategic review, the Board of Directors has decided to initiate a leadership transition. Sam Altman will be stepping down from his/her role, effective November 17, 2023. This decision is a result of mutual agreement and understanding that the company’s long-term strategy and core values require a different kind of leadership moving forward.
Instead, the board announced
Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.
That is corporate speak for “Sam Altman was a lying liar about something big enough to put the entire project at risk, and as such we need to cut ties with him immediately and also warn everyone who might work with him that he was a lying liar.” If you make accusations like that, and don’t back them up, I don’t think you get to be outraged that people start doubting your judgement.
If you pushed for fire sprinklers to be installed, then yell “FIRE”, and turn on the fire sprinklers, causing a bunch of water damage, and then refuse to tell anyone where you thought the fire was and why you thought that, I don’t think you should be too surprised when people contemplate taking away your ability to trigger the fire sprinklers.
The situation is actually even less surprising than this, because the thing people actually initially contemplated doing in response to the board’s actions was not even ‘taking away your ability to trigger the fire sprinklers’ but ‘going off and living in a new building somewhere else that you can’t flood for lulz’.
As I’m understanding the situation OpenAI’s board had and retained the legal right to stay in charge of OpenAI as all its employees left to go to Microsoft. If they decide they would rather negotiate from their starting point of ‘being in charge of an empty building’ to ‘making concessions’ this doesn’t mean that the charter didn’t mean anything! It means that the charter gave them a bunch of power which they wasted.
If you pushed for fire sprinklers to be installed, then yell “FIRE”, and turn on the fire sprinklers, causing a bunch of water damage, and then refuse to tell anyone where you thought the fire was and why you thought that, I don’t think you should be too surprised when people contemplate taking away your ability to trigger the fire sprinklers.
Keep in mind that the announcement was not something like
Instead, the board announced
That is corporate speak for “Sam Altman was a lying liar about something big enough to put the entire project at risk, and as such we need to cut ties with him immediately and also warn everyone who might work with him that he was a lying liar.” If you make accusations like that, and don’t back them up, I don’t think you get to be outraged that people start doubting your judgement.
The situation is actually even less surprising than this, because the thing people actually initially contemplated doing in response to the board’s actions was not even ‘taking away your ability to trigger the fire sprinklers’ but ‘going off and living in a new building somewhere else that you can’t flood for lulz’.
As I’m understanding the situation OpenAI’s board had and retained the legal right to stay in charge of OpenAI as all its employees left to go to Microsoft. If they decide they would rather negotiate from their starting point of ‘being in charge of an empty building’ to ‘making concessions’ this doesn’t mean that the charter didn’t mean anything! It means that the charter gave them a bunch of power which they wasted.