If Ilya was willing to cooperate, the board could fire Altman, with the Thanksgiving break available to aid the transition, and hope for the best.
Alternatively, the board could choose once again not to fire Altman, watch as Altman finished taking control of OpenAI and turned it into a personal empire, and hope this turns out well for the world.
They chose to pull the trigger.
I...really do not see how these were the only choices? Like, yes, ultimately my boss’s power over me stems from his ability to fire me. But it would be very strange to say ‘my boss and I disagreed, and he had to choose between firing me on the spot or letting me do whatever I wanted with no repercussions’?
Here are some things I can imagine the board doing. I don’t know if some of these are things they wouldn’t have had the power to do, or wouldn’t have helped, but:
Consolidating the board/attempting to reduce Altman’s control over it. If Sam could try to get Helen removed from the board (even though he controlled only 2⁄6 directors?) could the 4-2 majority of other directors not do anything other than ‘fire Sam as CEO’?
Remove Sam from the board but leave him as CEO?
Remove Greg from the board?
Appoint some additional directors aligned with the board?
Change the board’s charter to have more members appointed in different ways?
Publicly stating ‘We stand behind Helen and think she has raised legitimate concerns about safety that OpenAI is currently not handling well. We ask the CEO to provide a roadmap by which OpenAI will catch up to Anthropic in safety by 2025.’
Publicly stating ‘We object to OpenAI’s current commercial structure, in which the CEO is paid more for rushing ahead but not paid more for safety. We ask the CEO to restructure his compensation arrangements so that they do not incentivize danger.’
I am not a corporate politics expert! I am a programmer who hates people! But it seems to me that there are things you can do with a 4-2 board majority and the right to fire the CEO in between ‘fire the CEO on the spot with no explanation given’ and ‘fire every board member who disagrees with the CEO and do whatever he wants’. It...sort of...sounds like you imagine that in two weeks’ time Sam would have found a basilisk hack to mind-control the rest of the board and force them to do whatever he wanted? I do not see how that is the case? If a majority of the board is willing to fire him on the spot, it really doesn’t seem that he’s about to take over if not immediately fired.
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.
Speculating of course, but it reads to me like the four directors knew Altman was much better at politics and persuasion than they were. They briefly had a majority willing to kick him off, and while “Sam would have found a basilisk hack to mind-control the rest of the board” is phrased too magically to me I don’t think it’s that far off? This sort of dynamic feels familiar to me from playing games where one player is far better than the others at convincing people.
(And then because they were way outclassed in politics and persuasion they handled the aftermath of their decision poorly and Altman did an incredible job.)
In the last 4 days, they were probably running on no sleep (and less used to that/had less access to the relevant drugs than Altman and Bockman), and had approximately zero external advisors, while Altman seemed to be tapping into half of Silicon Valley and beyond for help/advice.
This comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of how OpenAI and most companies operate. The board is a check on power. In most companies they will have to approve of high level decisions: moving to a new office space or closing a new acquisition. But they have 0 day to day control. If they tell the CEO to fire these 10 people and he doesn’t do it, that’s it. They can’t do it themselves, they can’t tell the CEO’s underlings to do it. They have 0 options besides getting a new CEO. OpenAI’s board had less control even than this.
Tweeting “Altman is not following our directions and we don’t want to fire him, but we really want him to start doing what we ask” is a sure fire way to collapse your company and make you sound like a bunch of incompetent buffoons. It’s admitting that you won’t use the one tool that you actually do have. I’m certain the board threatened to fire Sam before this unless he made X changes. I’m certain Sam never made all of those X changes. Therefore they can either follow through on their threat or lose. Turns out following through on their threat was meaningless because Sam owns OpenAI both with tacit power and the corporate structure.
The board’s statement doesn’t mention them having made such a request to Altman which was denied, that’s a strong signal against things having played out that way.
I feel like this is a good observation. I notice I am confused at their choices given the information provided.… So there is probably more information? Yes, it is possible that Toner and the former board just made a mistake, and thought they had more control over the situation than they really did? Or underestimated Altman’s sway over the employees of the company?
The former board does not strike me as incompetent though. I don’t think it was sheer folly that lead them to pick this debacle as their best option.
Alternatively, they may have had information we don’t that lead them to believe that this was the least bad course of action.
The following is meant as a question to find out, not a statement of belief.
Nobody seems to have mentioned the possibility that initially they did not intend to fire Sam, but just to warn him or to give him a choice to restrain himself. Yet possibly he himself escalated it to firing or chose firing instead of complying with the restraint. He might have done that just in order to have all the consequences that have now taken place, giving him more power.
For example, people in power positions may escalate disagreements, because that is a territory they are more experienced with as compared to their opponents.
I...really do not see how these were the only choices? Like, yes, ultimately my boss’s power over me stems from his ability to fire me. But it would be very strange to say ‘my boss and I disagreed, and he had to choose between firing me on the spot or letting me do whatever I wanted with no repercussions’?
Here are some things I can imagine the board doing. I don’t know if some of these are things they wouldn’t have had the power to do, or wouldn’t have helped, but:
Consolidating the board/attempting to reduce Altman’s control over it. If Sam could try to get Helen removed from the board (even though he controlled only 2⁄6 directors?) could the 4-2 majority of other directors not do anything other than ‘fire Sam as CEO’?
Remove Sam from the board but leave him as CEO?
Remove Greg from the board?
Appoint some additional directors aligned with the board?
Change the board’s charter to have more members appointed in different ways?
Publicly stating ‘We stand behind Helen and think she has raised legitimate concerns about safety that OpenAI is currently not handling well. We ask the CEO to provide a roadmap by which OpenAI will catch up to Anthropic in safety by 2025.’
Publicly stating ‘We object to OpenAI’s current commercial structure, in which the CEO is paid more for rushing ahead but not paid more for safety. We ask the CEO to restructure his compensation arrangements so that they do not incentivize danger.’
I am not a corporate politics expert! I am a programmer who hates people! But it seems to me that there are things you can do with a 4-2 board majority and the right to fire the CEO in between ‘fire the CEO on the spot with no explanation given’ and ‘fire every board member who disagrees with the CEO and do whatever he wants’. It...sort of...sounds like you imagine that in two weeks’ time Sam would have found a basilisk hack to mind-control the rest of the board and force them to do whatever he wanted? I do not see how that is the case? If a majority of the board is willing to fire him on the spot, it really doesn’t seem that he’s about to take over if not immediately fired.
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.
Speculating of course, but it reads to me like the four directors knew Altman was much better at politics and persuasion than they were. They briefly had a majority willing to kick him off, and while “Sam would have found a basilisk hack to mind-control the rest of the board” is phrased too magically to me I don’t think it’s that far off? This sort of dynamic feels familiar to me from playing games where one player is far better than the others at convincing people.
(And then because they were way outclassed in politics and persuasion they handled the aftermath of their decision poorly and Altman did an incredible job.)
In the last 4 days, they were probably running on no sleep (and less used to that/had less access to the relevant drugs than Altman and Bockman), and had approximately zero external advisors, while Altman seemed to be tapping into half of Silicon Valley and beyond for help/advice.
This comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of how OpenAI and most companies operate. The board is a check on power. In most companies they will have to approve of high level decisions: moving to a new office space or closing a new acquisition. But they have 0 day to day control. If they tell the CEO to fire these 10 people and he doesn’t do it, that’s it. They can’t do it themselves, they can’t tell the CEO’s underlings to do it. They have 0 options besides getting a new CEO. OpenAI’s board had less control even than this.
Tweeting “Altman is not following our directions and we don’t want to fire him, but we really want him to start doing what we ask” is a sure fire way to collapse your company and make you sound like a bunch of incompetent buffoons. It’s admitting that you won’t use the one tool that you actually do have. I’m certain the board threatened to fire Sam before this unless he made X changes. I’m certain Sam never made all of those X changes. Therefore they can either follow through on their threat or lose. Turns out following through on their threat was meaningless because Sam owns OpenAI both with tacit power and the corporate structure.
From where do you get that certainty?
If they would have made those threats, why didn’t someone tell the New York Times journalists who were trying to understand what happened about it?
Why didn’t they say so when they fired him? It’s the kind of thing that’s easy to say to justify firing him.
The board’s statement doesn’t mention them having made such a request to Altman which was denied, that’s a strong signal against things having played out that way.
I feel like this is a good observation. I notice I am confused at their choices given the information provided.… So there is probably more information? Yes, it is possible that Toner and the former board just made a mistake, and thought they had more control over the situation than they really did? Or underestimated Altman’s sway over the employees of the company?
The former board does not strike me as incompetent though. I don’t think it was sheer folly that lead them to pick this debacle as their best option.
Alternatively, they may have had information we don’t that lead them to believe that this was the least bad course of action.
The following is meant as a question to find out, not a statement of belief.
Nobody seems to have mentioned the possibility that initially they did not intend to fire Sam, but just to warn him or to give him a choice to restrain himself. Yet possibly he himself escalated it to firing or chose firing instead of complying with the restraint. He might have done that just in order to have all the consequences that have now taken place, giving him more power.
For example, people in power positions may escalate disagreements, because that is a territory they are more experienced with as compared to their opponents.