[zucker42]

I think you're taking the intuition from a for-profit company and wrongly applying it to a non-profit company. When a board member criticizes a for-profit company, that's bad because the goal of the company is make a profit, and bad PR is bad for profit. A board member criticizing a non-profit doesn't have the same direct connection to a result opposite of the goals of the company. And if you actually read the page, it's an extremely mild criticism of OpenAI's decisions.

This situation is simultaneously "reckless board makes ill-considered mistake to suddenly fire CEO with insufficient justification" and "non-profit CEO slowly changes the culture of a non-profit to turn it into profit-seeking enterprise that he has a large amount of control over".

[Aunche]

>A board member criticizing a non-profit doesn't have the same direct connection to a result opposite of the goals of the company.

Even in a nonprofit, the board has an obligation to maintain a good working relationship with their organization. It's very rare for a board member to publicly criticized for their own organization.

Also, this argument goes out the window because OpenAI is not just a nonprofit. When they started their for-profit subsidiary in 2019, they accepted a fiduciary duty to their investors.

[sarchertech]

That’s not how that works. You can argue that Ilya has a fiduciary responsibility to the investors as an officer of the company. Toner doesn’t. She is an independent board member on the board of the non-profit that owns a controlling share in the company, but she doesn’t personally own a majority share of the company. As an independent board member, she has no duty but to uphold the charter. She represents no shareholders.

Majority shareholders may have some fiduciary responsibility to minority shareholders, so you might be able to make the argument that the board as a whole shouldn’t write disparaging remarks about the company. But even that argument is tenuous.

[Aunche]

She joined the board of OpenAI knowing that they owned a for profit subsidiary that received billions of dollars of investment. Being independent means that she could provide a unique outsider perspective, not that she has no obligations to her organization whatsoever. If you're going to be completely independent, you shouldn't be surprised when over 90% of the organization turns against you.

[sarchertech]

Whether people turn against her or not is irrelevant to my point. She has no personal fiduciary duty to the minority shareholders in the for-profit company. Her only duty is to the charter.

[Aunche]

That people turned against her is relevant because it demonstrates how untenable this standard of independence is. A charter is just a collection of words. She isn't a board member to a collection of words. She's a board member to an organization of people

[sarchertech]

It’s not relevant to my point that she has no fiduciary duty to anything but the charter.

Her only personal fiduciary responsibility is to the mission defined in that collection of words, not to the employees of the for-profit.

That’s how this works whether you think it should or not.

[calf]

Or, the organization has an obligation to respect freedom of academic inquiry, because the truth is what helps organizations grow, change, and mature, does it not? If the company cannot handle independent critique then its fragility is not the fault of the researcher who is telling the truth.

[ruszki]

> accepted a fiduciary duty to their investors.

Did they?