It's still not clear to me how a board member prospectively running a chip company (a related but different business) works against OpenAI's interests. And people here seem to be making an awful lot of assumptions in order to somehow connect those dots.
Sam Altman has inside information on OpenAI's current and future hardware needs. Sam Altman as CEO, was in a position to direct OpenAI's current and future hardware purchases.
How can he separate those concerns from having his own hardware initiative put together precisely to serve OpenAI and its competitors hardware needs?
Without an agreement with the OpenAI board on how these conflicts of trade secret information and executive power can be settled (Significant shares in the new company for OpenAI?) no competent board would put up with this.
This situation smacks of the ethically questionable transition to a closed/profit organization, after receiving initial funding based on their being an open/non-profit organization. (Apparently the original funders didn't retain any veto power over such a transition, to the regret of at least one significant donor.)
>Without an agreement with the OpenAI board on how these conflicts of trade secret information and executive power can be settled (Significant shares in the new company for OpenAI?) no competent board would put up with this.
I would say if they really did anticipate and worry about such an issue, a competent board would work toward forging such an agreement, rather than firing the CEO years before the aforementioned chip company even existed and before telling any of their other stakeholders.