You are far more charitable than I. (I have no idea why I’m worked up. I don’t work at OAI.) They pulled the dumbest virtual corporate hostage crisis, for ostensibly flimsy reasons, and even has mainstream media wondering whether they’re just crazy. People are just begging to know why, and they seemingly have nothing. It’s incredible. Good lord, if there’s a lesson, it’s that these people should never have been nor should ever be in charge of anything of any importance. (Again, no idea why I’m worked up — I don’t actually care about Sam Altman.) Oh, no, sorry, that’s not the lesson. The lesson is picking board members is probably the most important thing you’ll do. Don’t be cavalier. It will bite you.
Perhaps this works a lot of us up because we have to be consummate professionals our whole lives, carefully working over the consequences of all the choices we make on the behalf of our employers, sitting in hour-long meetings about thousand dollar decisions while billion dollar bozos can do whatever they want with no forethought and never see a consequence.
I've been at several startups and several public companies. You rarely hear anything from the board. If that happens, someone really screwed up. Putting myself in the shoes of someone working at OpenAI, I'd be pretty worked-up over this. I guess I'm saying it's out of empathy because this could have been the startup any of us were at.