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Comment by fullshark | Hacker News Reader

Man this still seems crazy to me. The idea that this tension between commercial/non-commercial aspirations got so bad they felt the nuclear option of a surprise firing of Altman was the only move available doesn't seem plausible to me.

I believe this decision was ego and vanity driven with this post-hoc rationalization that it was because of the mission of "benefiting humanity."

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What if the board gave Altman clear direction, Altman told them he accepted it, and then went off and did something else? This hypothesis doesn’t require the board’s direction to be objectively good.

IDK none of us are privy to any details of festering tensions or if there was a "last straw" scenario that if it was explained it would make sense. Something during that dev day really pissed some people off that's for sure.

Given what the picture looks like today though that's my guess, firing Altman is an extreme scenario! Lots of CEOs have tensions with their boards over various issues otherwise the board is pointless!

I strongly agree, yeah! The trick is making those tensions constructive and no matter who's at fault (could be both sides), someone failed there.

In a clash of big egos, both are often true. Practical differences escalate until personal resentment forms and the parties stop engaging with due respect for each other.

Once that happens, real and intentional slights start accumulating and de-escalation becomes extremely difficult.

I wonder if the "benefiting humanity" bit is code for anti mil-tech. What if Sam wasn't being honest about a relationship with a consumer that weaponized OpenAI products against humans?

Could be.

Or it could be about the alignment problem. Are they designing AI to prioritise humanity’s interests, or its corporate masters’ interests? One way is better for humanity, the other brings in more cash.

But the board accused Sam of not being "consistently candid". Alignment issues could stand on their own ground for cause and would have been better PR too. Instead of the mess they have now.

Ilya has Israeli citizenship and has toured Israel and given talks at Israeli universities including one talk with Sam Altman.

He is not anti mil-tech.

Did those talks have anything to do with mil-tech though?

Unless the mil-tech was going to their enemies.

I don't think anyone at OpenAI was planning to give mil-tech to Iran and Iranian proxies like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.

Ya. You're right. Time to let the theory die.

That's a pretty big leap of logic there.

Israel is a heavily militarized country. The country would not be able to exist without the latest military tech. Ilya flirting with the tech scene of Israel is a very good indicator that he is not anti mil-tech.

Your first two sentences would also apply to the US.

Does that mean any foreign scientist speaking at US universities advocates military applications of their work?

Yeah, the surprise firing part really doesn't make much sense. My best guess is that if you look at the composition of this board (minus Altman and Brockman), it seems to be mostly academics and the wife of a Hollywood actor. They may not be very experienced in the area of tech company boards, and might not have been aware that there are smoother ways to force a CEO out that are less damaging to your organization. Not sure, but that's the best I can figure out based on what we know so far.

>it seems to be mostly academics and the wife of a Hollywood actor

This argument would require you ignore both Sutskever himself as well as D'Angelo, who was CTO/VP of Engineering at Facebook and then founding CEO of Quora.

Maybe, but I have a different opinion. I have worked at startups before where we were building something both technically interesting and what could clearly be a super value add for the business domain. I’ve then witnessed PMs be brought on who cared little about any of that and instead tried to converge in the exact same enshittified product as everywhere else with little care or understand for the real solutions we were building towards. When this happened I knew within a month that the vision of the company, and it’s goals outside of generating investor returns, was dead if this person had their way.

I’ve specifically seen the controlling members of a company realize this after 7-8 months and when that happens it’s a quick change of course. I could see why you’d think it’s ego but I think it’s closer to my previous situation than what you’re stating here. This is a pivotal course correction and they’re not pretty, this just happens to be the most public one ever due to the nature of the business and company.

This is not commercial vs non commercial imho. This is the old classic humans being humans.

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