Until they say otherwise, I am going to take them at their word that it was because he a) hired two people to do the same project, and b) gave two board members different accounts of the same employee. It's not my job nor the internet's to try to think up better-sounding reasons on their behalf.
https://twitter.com/geoffreyirving/status/172675427022402397...
I have no details of OpenAI's Board’s reasons for firing Sam, and I am conflicted (lead of Scalable Alignment at Google DeepMind). But there is a large, very loud pile on vs. people I respect, in particular Helen Toner and Ilya Sutskever, so I feel compelled to say a few things.
...
Third, my prior is strongly against Sam after working for him for two years at OpenAI:
1. He was always nice to me.
2. He lied to me on various occasions
3. He was deceptive, manipulative, and worse to others, including my close friends (again, only nice to me, for reasons)
> "We were trying to get a big client for weeks, and they said no and went with a competitor. The competitor already had a terms sheet from the company were we trying to sign up. It was real serious.
> We were devastated, but we decided to fly down and sit in their lobby until they would meet with us. So they finally let us talk to them after most of the day.
> We then had a few more meetings, and the company wanted to come visit our offices so they could make sure we were a 'real' company. At that time, we were only 5 guys. So we hired a bunch of our college friends to 'work' for us for the day so we could look larger than we actually were. It worked, and we got the contract."
Those sound like good reasons to dislike him and not trust him. But ultimately we are right back where we started: they still aren't good enough reasons to suddenly fire him the way they did.
In my eyes these two explanations are simple errors which can occur to everybody and in a normal situation you would talk about these Issues and you could resolve them in 5min without firing anybody.
Look at all the speculation on here. There are dozens of different theories about why they did what they did running so rampant people are starting to accept each of them as fact, when in fact probably all of them are going to turn out to be wrong.
People need to take a step back and look at the available evidence. This report is the clearest indication we have gotten of their reasons, and they come from a reliable source. Why are we not taking them at their word?
Ignoring the lack of credibility in the given explanations, people are, perhaps, also wary that taking boards/execs at their word hasn't always worked out so well in the past.
Until an explanation that at least passes the sniff test for truthiness comes out, people will keep speculating.
And so they should.
If board relations have been acrimonious and adversarial for months, and things are just getting worse, then I can imagine someone powerful bringing evidence of (yet another instance of) bad/unscrupulous/disrespectful behavior to the board, and a critical mass of the board feeling they’ve reached a “now or never” breaking point and making a quick decision to get it over with and wear the consequence.
Of course, it seems that they have miscalculated the consequences and botched the execution. Although we’ll have to see how it pans out.
I’m speculating like everyone else. But knowing how board relations can be, it’s one scenario that fits the evidence we do have and doesn’t require anyone involved to be anything other than human.
I’m guessing he infuriated them with combinations of “white“ lies, Little sins of omission, general two-facedness etc., and they built it up in their heads and with each other to the point it seemed like a much bigger deal than it objectively was. Now people are asking for receipts of categorical crimes or malfeasance and nothing they can say is good enough to justify how they overreacted.
Your take isn't uncommon, only are missing the main point of your interpretation - that the board is fully incompetent if it was truly that petty of a reason to ruin the company.
It's not even that it's not a justifiable reason, but they did it without getting legal advice or consulting with partners and didn't even wait for markets to close.
Board destroyed billions in brand and talent value for OpenAI and Microsoft in a mid day decision like that.
This is also on Sam Altman himself for building and then entertaining such an incompetent board.
It's perfectly obvious that these weren't the actual reasons. However yes, they are still incompetent because they couldn't think of a better justification (amongst other reasons which led to this debacle).
No, I totally agree. In fact what annoys me about all the speculation is that it seems like people are creating fanfiction to make the board seem much more competent than all available evidence suggests they actually are.
