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Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

Some speculate that Helen and Adam were on the verge of being forced out by Sam, the former in the lieu of new investors needing a board seat for their person and the latter due to conflict of interest (via Poe after GPT Store launched on Devday). Once Ilya bought into their concerns, Adam and Helen, without informing any stakeholder (incl Microsoft), moved swiftly and decisively before any director changed their mind (like Ilya eventually did).

https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1727026942560330172 / https://archive.is/l89JO

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If you're an investor in OpenAI's for-profit unit, the very clear lawsuit target is D'Angelo. His extreme conflict of interest problem is a personal bankruptcy waiting to happen given the value destruction OpenAI has just (probably) suffered. Investors should be promptly slapping a multi billion dollar lawsuit down on the table: resign or else.

Then stop messing around and fully split off the for-profit unit, run by Altman. They're in perpetual conflict. The non-profit can use its ownership stake (liquidate it gradually) for funding for a very long time and can still pursue its mission of safe AGI. It should provide tens of billions of dollars in funding for the non-profit. The for-profit can then be unleashed to fully pursue commercialization related to GPT without hold-backs.

The absurd fantasy of the dual OpenAI missions co-existing in peace needs to die. They can't co-exist peacefully within one body, everything about their requirements to thrive going forward puts them at odds with each other (from speed, to compensation, to funding requirements, to management approach).

Nothing is absurd about expecting a company, run by a group of people, to uphold the values and mission its existence was predicated upon, down to the name of the company itself. Especially in such a short time frame.

Of course it's absurd: it was all a game of playing pretend. That's the fantasy part.

It hadn't been open AI for a long time.

The entity that you're referring to no longer exists at present. They can revive it by splitting these inherently at-conflict entities apart.

With tens of billions in funding via stock liquidation they can go back to pursuing actual open AI and have a lot of money to throw at doing so, without concerns for conflict with a for-profit mission in relation to a funding source.

Today the mission of being open with their AI tech is at conflict with the funding base: GPT commercialization. At least with how they have been operating for years now. There's no fixing that in the current structure.

All great points, it’s wild that this small non-profit board had so much power with so little at stake for themselves. That’s a typical feature of a non-profit board, but in this case the entity wasn’t a typical non-profit.

To your points, such a split makes too much sense and the ship has probably sailed when the employees showed they have no loyalty or responsibilities to the organization itself.

This seems the simplest explanation, and relevant to the post, cause for a lawsuit. Helen could be principled about the mission, but difficult to say Adam was, given what he stood to gain.

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