[shandor]

I’m confused how the board is still keeping their radio silence 100%. Where I’m from, with a shitstorm this big raging, and the board doing nothing, they might very easily be personally held responsible for all kinds of utterly nasty legal action.

Is it just different because they’re a nonprofit? Or how on earth the board is thinking they can get away with this anymore?

[rjzzleep]

This isn't unlike the radio silence Brendan Eich kept, when the Mozilla sh* hit the fan. This is in my opinion the outcome of when really technical and scientific people have been given decades of advice of not talking to the public.

I have seen this play out many times in different locations for different people. A lot of technical folks like myself were given the advice that actions speak louder than words.

I was once scouted at a silicon valley selenium browser testing company. I migrated their cloud offering from VMWare to KVM, which depended on code I wrote and then defied my middle manager by improving their entire infrastructure performance by 40%. My instinct was to communicate this to the leadership, but I was advised not to skip my middle manager.

The next time I went the office I got a severance package and later found out that 2 hours later during the all hands they presented my work as their own. The middle manage went on to become the CTO of several companies.

I doubt we will ever find out what really happened or at least not in the next 5-10 years. OpenAI let Sam Altman be the public face of the company and got burned by it.

Personally I had no idea Ilya was the main guy in this company until the drama that happened. I also didn't know that Sam Altman was basically only there to bring in the cash. I assume that most people will actually never know that part of OpenAI.

[winterplace]

Your instinct was right, who advised you against that?

What happened in the days before you got the severance package?

Do you have an email address or a contact method?

[rjzzleep]

I've seen this advice being given in different situations. I've also met all sorts of engineers that have been given this advice. "Make your manager look good and he will reward you" is kinda the general idea. I guess it can be true sometimes, but I have a feeling that that might be the minority or is at least heavily dependent on how confident that person is.

I would not be surprised if Sam Altman would keep telling the board and more specifically Ilya to trust him since they(he) don't understand the business side of things.

> Do you have an email address or a contact method?

EDIT: It's in my profile(now).

> What happened in the days before you got the severance package?

I went to DEFCON out of pocket and got booted off a conference call supposedly due to my bad hotel wifi.

[selestify]

Wow, I have nothing to say, other than that’s some major BS!

[lolinder]

What specific legal action could be pursued against them where you're from? Who would have a cause for action?

(I'm genuinely curious—in the US I'm not aware of any action that could be taken here by anyone besides possibly Sam Altman for libel.)

[pama]

I'm guessing that unless the board caves to everything that the counterparties ask of it, MSFT lawyers will very soon reveal to the board the full range of possible legal actions against the board. The public will probably not see many of these actions until months or years later, but it's super hard to imagine that such random jumping of destruction and conflicts will go unpunished.

[Symmetry]

Whether or not MicroSoft has a winnable case, often "the process is the punishment" in cases like these and its easy to threaten a long, drawn-out, and expensive legal fight.

[23B1]

Shareholder lawsuits happen all the time for much smaller issues.

[pavlov]

OpenAI is a non-profit with a for-profit subsidiary. The controlling board is at the non-profit and immune to shareholder concerns.

Investors in OpenAI-the-business were literally told they should think of it as a donation. There’s not much grounds for a shareholder lawsuit when you signed away everything to a non-profit.

[jacquesm]

Absolutely nobody on a board is immune from judicial oversight. That fiction really needs to go. Anybody affected by their decisions could have standing to sue. They are lucky that nobody has done it so far.

[698969]

I guess big in-person investors were told as much, but if it's about that big purple banner on their site, that seems to be an image with no alt-text. I wonder if an investor with impaired vision may be able to sue them for failing to communicate that part.

[23B1]

Corporate structure is not immunity from getting sued. Evidently HN doesn't understand that lawsuits are a tactic, not a conclusion.

[lolinder]

Right, but my understanding is that the nonprofit structure eliminates most (if not all) possible shareholder suits.

[shandor]

As I mentioned in my comment, I'm unaware of the effect of the nonprofit status on this. But like the parent commenter mentioned I mostly was thinking of laws prohibiting destruction of shareholder value (edit: whatever that may mean considering a nonprofit).

It just seems ludicrous that the board could run a company into the ground like this and just shrug "nah we're nonprofit so you can't touch us and BTW we don't even need to make any statements whatsoever".

There have been many comments that the initial firing of Altman was in a way completely according to the nonprofit charter, at least if it could prove that Altman had been executing in a way as to jeopardize the Charter.

But even then, how could the board say they are working in the best interest of even the nonprofit itself, if their company is just disintegrating while they willfully refuse to give any information to public?

[turquoisevar]

> It just seems ludicrous that the board could run a company into the ground like this and just shrug "nah we're nonprofit so you can't touch us and BTW we don't even need to make any statements whatsoever".

As ludicrous as that might seem, that's pretty much the reality.

The only one that would have a cause of action in this is the non-profit itself, and for all intents and purposes, the board of said non-profit is the non-profit.

Assuming that what people claim is right and this severely damages the non-profit, then as far as the law is concerned, it’s just one of a million other failed non-profits.

The only caveat to that would be if there were any impropriety, for example, when decisions were made that weren’t following the charter and by-laws of the non-profit or if the non-profit’s coffers have been emptied.

Other than that, the law doesn’t care. In a similar way the law wouldn’t care if you light your dollar bills on fire.

[23B1]

No corporate structure – except for maybe incorporating in the DPRK – can eliminate lawsuits.