That was fascinating<p>So interesting the, only mentioned, fact:<p>> Altman did not tell the board he owned the OpenAI startup fund.<p>It was a non profit. That on its own, IMO, a firing offense<p>What a dreadfully dishonest human being
"When OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, the board was not informed in advance and found out about it on Twitter."<p>Why the hell should a company have to announce products to the board before launching them?
Who among us has not wanted to see a not-consistently-candid CEO / director / etc. removed from the organization?<p>I see signs of Toner trying to spin things to save face.<p>“for years, Sam had made it really difficult for the board to actually do that job by withholding information, misrepresenting things that were happening at the company, in some cases outright lying to the board … [Altman gave] inaccurate information about the small number of formal safety processes that the company did have in place … For any individual case, Sam could always come up with some kind of innocuous-sounding explanation of why it wasn’t a big deal, or misinterpreted, or whatever … But the end effect was that after years of this kind of thing, all four of us who fired him came to the conclusion that we just couldn’t believe things that Sam was telling us, and that’s just a completely unworkable place to be in as a board”<p>Thoughts:<p>- The claim that this had been going on for years is presented as support for the decision to oust Sam. This is a spin, because an easy criticism is that, if this had been going on for so long, why didn’t Toner do anything about it years sooner? As she says herself, all along she had been responsible as a board member for “providing independent oversight over the company,” so there was a years-long lapse in effectiveness in her oversight duties if her claims are true.<p>- The emphasis on “all four of us who fired him” is an attempt to provide social proof that she did the reasonable thing. It doesn’t help answer the question of “why” — the purpose of the article — so it’s rhetoric serving some other purpose.