> I'm seeing a lot of "Monday morning quarterback" in this thread
That's fine but you are not forced to participate.
> That's not obvious to me. Suppose OpenAI deliberately partners with a number of different infra providers. That creates a bunch of drag because they have to create a compatibility layer for staying agnostic to the underlying infra. And the outcome in a situation like this would probably be fairly similar: Since big tech companies are focused on making a buck, they would probably pressure the board to do whatever they think will be most profitable, just like Microsoft.
So, either you are 'OpenAI' and that means open to all or you are Microsoft AI, licensing your tech to one of the least ethical and most wealthy companies in the world. If the board didn't have anything to say about that at the time and if they didn't resign en masse you have to assume that they are ok with it.
> Additionally, the role of the board is to supervise the CEO, not make strategic decisions, no? If the MS partnership was a mistake, Sam is the primary person to blame here.
So are they or are they not there to supervise the CEO?
In my view a board exists to protect the interests of the stakeholders guided by a charter. OpenAI sees 'humanity' (whatever that means to them) as their stakeholders and that trumps each and every other party involved. But it is unclear whether their actions really benefit those stakeholders or if it is just people being people.
So far I'm seeing a lot of the latter and only little bits of the former.