Is it just different because they’re a nonprofit? Or how on earth the board is thinking they can get away with this anymore?
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.
What happened in the days before you got the severance package?
Do you have an email address or a contact method?
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.
(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.)
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.
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?
