I think the central confusion here is: why, in the face of someone explicitly trying to take over the board, would the rest of the board just keep that person around?
None of the things you suggested have any bearing whatsoever on whether Sam Altman would continue to try and take over the board. If he has no board position but is still the CEO, he can still do whatever he wants with the company, and also try to take over the board. If he is removed as CEO but remains on the board, he will still try to take over the board. Packing the board has no bearing on the things Sam can do to expand his influence there, it just means it takes longer. The problem the board had to solve was not the immediacy of Sam taking over, but the inevitability of it. The gambit with removing Helen Toner failed, but other gambits would follow.
Also notice that the 4-2 split is not a fixed faction: Ilya switched sides as soon as the employees revolted putting us at 3-3, and it appears Adam D’Angelo was instrumental in the negotiation to bring Sam back. What looks at first like a 4-2 split and therefore safe was more like a 2-1-1-2 that briefly coalesced into a 4-2 split in response to Sam trying to make it a 1-1-1-3 split instead. Under those conditions, Sam would be able to do anything that wasn’t so egregious it caused the other three to unify AND one of his team’s seats to defect.
In principle, the 4 members of the board had an option which would look much better: to call a meeting of all 6 board members, and to say at that meeting, “hey, the 4 of us think we should remove Sam from the company and remove Greg from the board, let’s discuss this matter before we take a vote: tell us why we should not do that”.
That would be honorable, and would look honorable, and the public relation situation would look much better for them.
The reason they had not done that was, I believe, that they did not feel confident they could resist persuasion powers of Sam, that they thought he would have talked at least one of them out of it.
But then what they did looked very unreasonable from more than one viewpoint:
Should you take a monumental decision like this, if your level of confidence in this decision is so low that you think you might be talked out of it on the spot?
Should you destroy someone like this before letting this person to defend himself?
They almost behaved as if Sam was already a hostile superintelligent AI who was trying to persuade them to let him out of the box, and who had superpowers of persuasion, and the only way to avoid the outcomes of letting him out of the box was to close one’s ears and eyes and shut him down before he could say anything.
Perhaps this was close to how they actually felt...
I agree with this, and I am insatiably curious about what was behind their decisions about how to handle it.
But my initial reaction based on what we have seen is that it wouldn’t have worked, because Sam Altman comes to the meeting with a pre-rallied employee base and the backing of Microsoft. Since Ilya reversed on the employee revolt, I doubt he would have gone along with the plan when presented a split of OpenAI up front.
I think the central confusion here is: why, in the face of someone explicitly trying to take over the board, would the rest of the board just keep that person around?
None of the things you suggested have any bearing whatsoever on whether Sam Altman would continue to try and take over the board. If he has no board position but is still the CEO, he can still do whatever he wants with the company, and also try to take over the board. If he is removed as CEO but remains on the board, he will still try to take over the board. Packing the board has no bearing on the things Sam can do to expand his influence there, it just means it takes longer. The problem the board had to solve was not the immediacy of Sam taking over, but the inevitability of it. The gambit with removing Helen Toner failed, but other gambits would follow.
Also notice that the 4-2 split is not a fixed faction: Ilya switched sides as soon as the employees revolted putting us at 3-3, and it appears Adam D’Angelo was instrumental in the negotiation to bring Sam back. What looks at first like a 4-2 split and therefore safe was more like a 2-1-1-2 that briefly coalesced into a 4-2 split in response to Sam trying to make it a 1-1-1-3 split instead. Under those conditions, Sam would be able to do anything that wasn’t so egregious it caused the other three to unify AND one of his team’s seats to defect.
In principle, the 4 members of the board had an option which would look much better: to call a meeting of all 6 board members, and to say at that meeting, “hey, the 4 of us think we should remove Sam from the company and remove Greg from the board, let’s discuss this matter before we take a vote: tell us why we should not do that”.
That would be honorable, and would look honorable, and the public relation situation would look much better for them.
The reason they had not done that was, I believe, that they did not feel confident they could resist persuasion powers of Sam, that they thought he would have talked at least one of them out of it.
But then what they did looked very unreasonable from more than one viewpoint:
Should you take a monumental decision like this, if your level of confidence in this decision is so low that you think you might be talked out of it on the spot?
Should you destroy someone like this before letting this person to defend himself?
They almost behaved as if Sam was already a hostile superintelligent AI who was trying to persuade them to let him out of the box, and who had superpowers of persuasion, and the only way to avoid the outcomes of letting him out of the box was to close one’s ears and eyes and shut him down before he could say anything.
Perhaps this was close to how they actually felt...
I agree with this, and I am insatiably curious about what was behind their decisions about how to handle it.
But my initial reaction based on what we have seen is that it wouldn’t have worked, because Sam Altman comes to the meeting with a pre-rallied employee base and the backing of Microsoft. Since Ilya reversed on the employee revolt, I doubt he would have gone along with the plan when presented a split of OpenAI up front.