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by mijoharas 936 days ago
How has the board shown that they fired Sam Altman due to "responsible governance".

They haven't really said anything about why it was, and according to business insider[0] (the only reporting that I've seen that says anything concrete) the reasons given were:

> One explanation was that Altman was said to have given two people at OpenAI the same project.

> The other was that Altman was said to have given two board members different opinions about a member of personnel.

Firing the CEO of a company and only being able to articulate two (in my opinion) weak examples of why, and causing >95% of your employees to say they will quit unless you resign does not seem responsible.

If they can articulate reasons why it was necessary, sure, but we haven't seen that yet.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/openais-employees-given-expl...

1 comments

Good lord: it’s a private company. As a general matter of course it’s inadvisable to comment on specifics of why someone is fired. The lack of a thing that pretty much never happens anyway (public comment) is just harmful to your soap opera, not to the potential legitimacy of the action.
According to reports they haven't told executives and employees inside the company. (I'm not arguing that they should speak publicly, though given the position the board put itself in I think hiring PR people for external crisis comms is very much warranted)

When 95% of your staff threatens to resign and says "you have made a mistake", that's when it's time to say "no, the very good reasons we did it are this". That didn't happen.

Its not a private company it is a non profit working in the public interest this usually requires some sort of public accountability. The board want to be a public good when they make decisions but want to be a private entity when those decisions are criticised by the public.