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.
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.