[nvm0n2]

> I cannot think of a single facet of their day-to-day operations, product roadmap, competitive position, etc. that would be improved

If the dispute is over whether they should be a pure research nonprofit or not, then operations, product roadmaps and competitive positions are things they would not even want to begin with. It was only four of them that booted the other two out, and of those at least two seem to be professional non-profit board sitters. The transition of OpenAI into an actual product company doing something useful for other people is incredibly recent, it's barely a year old. It may be that they simply felt that offering products isn't what OpenAI is meant to be doing.

Alternatively it could be some blowup related to doomerism, although the memo saying it's not related to "safety practices" may rule that out.

[bbor]

Definitely related to doomerism, imo. There’s no way Ilya spends all day thinking about how to contain “super intelligent AI” and watching prototype demos that “push back the veil of ignorance” and makes a decision of this magnitude without all that being the driving factor.

The safety comment seemed more about reassuring people there wasn’t, like, a data breach or “escaped model” or something crazy. In other words, clarifying that the disagreement was about the future, not the present.