[dehrmann]

> I still cannot process what’s happened to one of the most prominent and hyped companies of the past year in just one weekend.

That's kinda what happened. The latest gist I read was that the non-profit, idealistic(?) board clashed with the for-profit, hypergrowth CEO over the direction to take the company. When you read the board's bios, they're weren't ready for this job (few are; these rocket ship stories are rare), the rocket ship got ahead of their non-profit goals, and they found themselves in over their heads, then failed to game out how this would go over (poor communication with MS, not expecting Altman to get so much support).

From here, the remaining board either needs to either surface some very damning evidence (the memo ain't it) or step down and let MS and Sequoia find a new board (even if they're not officially entitled to do that). Someone needs to be saying mea culpa.

[sanxiyn]

I am not sure why. As far as I can tell, the board doesn't need to answer to anyone.

[g42gregory]

Unfortunately (or fortunately?), you always have to answer to somebody. In this board's case, they have to answer to investors, Microsoft in particular. Why? Because Microsoft can pull the money (apparently they only sent a fraction of $10Bn so far) and can sabotage the partnership deal. The OpenAI won't meet the payroll and won't be able to run the GPU farm. Microsoft already threatened to do exactly that.

My suspicion is that Microsoft will do exactly that: they will pull the money, sabotage the partnership deal and focus on rebuilding GPT in-house (with some of the key OpenAI people hired away). They will do this gradually, on their own timetable, so that it does not disrupt the GPT Azure access to their own customers.

I doubt that there could be a replacement for the Microsoft deal, because who would want to go through this again? OpenAI might be able to raise a billion or two from the hard core AI Safety enthusiasts, but they won't be able to raise $10s of Billions needed to run the next cycle of scaling.

[dehrmann]

I think the diagram I saw showed they don't actually answer to MS, VCs, or employee investors? And not even that they're out-voted, they don't answer to them at all.

[sanxiyn]

As far as I can tell, this is correct.