this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
77 points (87.4% liked)
Technology
59148 readers
2266 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
How in any of this does the board seem to have been right?
It was an ethics board and he showed everyone it was a sham.
This is lemmy so people are going to side with the non-profit side of things here
The best I can understand of the situation is that Sam and lots of the rest of the employees were generally trying to move toward a for-profit model. The board didn’t like this and fired him which is within their power. So if you don’t like a for-profit Open AI then you’ll generally side with the board on this one. (Part of the boards “job” is ensuring that AGI is developed for the benefit of all of humanity. This isn’t an exaggeration it’s literally outlined in their list of duties)
If you only look at how wishy washy the board has been then they look like big dumb dumbs. But given how many employees walked out they had no choice but to try and get him back. At this point many people are expecting the board to resign in full and a new board to be instated but we’ll just have to wait and see
Sam Altman was already CEO of the for-profit arm of OpenAI. The non-profit arm, OpenAI, Inc. had a controlling 51% of shares. So I’m not sure what you mean when you say:
They were already a for-profit company. What we saw this week is that the non-profit board may have had a 51% controlling share in the stock, but that’s the only control they had, and it was totally on paper. Without the employees of their for-profit arm, and apparently without Altman, the non-profit arm has exactly jack shit, as the entire world now plainly sees.