I read something about him not being honest with the board, or keeping things from them? Didn’t see any elaboration, though.
Comment on OpenAI brings Sam Altman back as CEO less than a week after he was fired by board
TallonMetroid@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I’m still wondering why he was even fired in the first place. I’d thought that perhaps I just hadn’t paid proper enough attention and missed the reason, but nope, no reason was ever given.
soupcat@sopuli.xyz 7 months ago
echodot@feddit.uk 7 months ago
That’s all they have said as well.
We fired the guy for a reason, it was a good reason honest, no we’re not going to tell you what it was. Anyway we’ve hired him back now so it’s fine, stop asking questions.
JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz 7 months ago
They have been asked to provide that by the media, the first temporary CEO they named, their investors some of which even threatened to sue of they didn’t disclose it. So either it is something so discriminating to the board they’re willing to rather sink with it, or they actually don’t have anything solid at all and fired him without cause.
DR_Hero@programming.dev 7 months ago
The reason that makes the most sense in one of the articles I’ve read is that they fired him after he tried to push out one of the board members.
Replacing that board member with an ally would have cemented control over the board for a time. They might not have felt his was being honest in his motives for the ousting, so it was basically fire now, or lose the option to fire him in the future.
The other theory I’ve heard going around
elxeno@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Trust the board, bro.
aard@kyu.de 7 months ago
There were some rumours that he was pushing the commercial side too fast, potentially ignoring ethical issues. Given Altmans lobbying against AI regulation in the EU I find that plausible.
Since now apparently the investors won it proves that the special structure of for-profit owned by non-profit intended to keep them honest does not work - and we urgently need to have regulation in place, as self-regulation does not work.
guitarsarereal@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
I’m not sure if I’d call this an investor win. More or less 90% of the company threatened to leave. It made sense on their part to do whatever it took to get him back. Anyways, looks like he stopped for a couple seconds to think about how smart it really was to join Microsoft.
Iceblade02@lemmy.world 7 months ago
The “Private investor” in this case is Microsoft, which “graciously” offered to bring all the staff into their own new AI project. This is 100% an investor (a.k.a microsoft) win.
guitarsarereal@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Well, kind of. It’s a bad look for MS to be so heavily invested in such a dumpster fire of a corporation, so it’s okay for them it got resolved, but they would have won out more if Altman had joined them. It was the other investors, including a number of employees, who would have really lost out if the company had just collapsed in on itself like it immediately started doing.
So, sure, investor win. But MS more or less lost this one.
aard@kyu.de 7 months ago
It’s hard to tell from the outside - but at the beginning it mainly looked like pressure from the investors. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’d been a lot of activity from them behind the scenes, and the “90% leaving” part wasn’t really “standing up for Altman”, but more “follow the money”, with investors possibly pressuring employees in various ways.