I’m not saying it was handled well. It wasn’t.

My point was that the industry is hypocritical in praising sudden firings of most people while viewing it as awful only when especially privileged stars like Altman are the victim.

Cost reduction is a red herring - I mentioned it only as one example of the many reasons the industry trend setters give to justify the love of sudden firings against the rank-and-file, but I never implied it was applicable to executive firings like this one. The arguments on how the trend setters want star executives to be treated are totally different from what they want for the rank and file, and that’s part of the problem I’m pointing out.

I generally support trying to resolve issues with an employee before taking an irreversible action like this, whether they are named Sam Altman or any unknown regular tech worker, excepting only cases where taking the time for that is clearly unacceptable (like where someone is likely to cause harm to the organization or its mission if you raise the issue with them).

If this case does fall into that exception, the OpenAI board still didn’t explain that well to the public and seems not to have properly handled advance communications with stakeholders like MS, completely agreed. If no such exception applies here, they ideally shouldn’t have acted so suddenly. But again, by doing so they followed industry norms for “normal people”, and all the hypocritical outrage is only because Altman is extra privileged rather than a “normal person.”

Beyond that, any trust I might have had in their judgment that firing Altman was the correct decision evaporated when they were surprised by the consequences and worked to walk it back the very next day.

Still, even if these board members should step down due to how they handled it, that’s a separate question from whether they were right to work in some fashion toward a removal of Altman and Brockman from their positions of power at OpenAI. If Altman and Brockman truly were working against the nonprofit mission or being dishonest with their board, then maybe neither they nor the current board are the right leaders to achieve OpenAI’s mission. Different directors and officers can be found. Ideally they should have some directors with nonprofit leadership experience, which they have so far lacked.

Or if the board got fooled by a dishonest argument from Ilya without misbehavior from Altman and Brockman, then it would be better to remove Ilya and the current board and reinstall Altman and Brockman.

Either way, I agree that the current board is inadequate. But we shouldn’t use that to prematurely rush to the defense of Altman and Brockman, nor of course to prematurely trust the judgment of the board. The public sphere mostly has one side of the story, so we should reserve judgment on what the appropriate next steps are. (Conveniently, it’s not our call in any case.)

I would however be wary of too heavily prioritizing MS’s interests. Yes, they are a major stakeholder and should have been consulted, assuming they wouldn’t have given an inappropriate advance heads-up to Altman or Brockman. But OpenAI’s controlling entity is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and in order for that to remain the correct tax and corporate classification, they need to prioritize the general public benefit of their approved charitable mission over even MS’s interests, when and if the two conflict.

If new OpenAI leadership wants the 501(c)(3) nonprofit to stop being a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, that’s a much more complicated transition that can involve courts and state charities regulators and isn’t always possible in a way that makes sense to pursue. That permanence is sometimes part of the point of adopting 501(c)(3) nonprofit status in the first place.