Telling almost no one in advance was intended to protect the board from Altman's interference but put them in an indefensible situation. Alone against very rich, well connected people, without even a narrative to offer.
Shouldn't the board be capable of agreeing on a press release among themselves?
While in retrospect I think the board's actions may have been warranted, their communication was absolutely atrocious.
This sounds bad enough to my layperson ears:
"Sam didn't inform the board that he owned the OpenAI startup fund, even though he constantly was claiming to be an independent board member with no financial interest in the company," she said.
I'm not a lawyer. Anyone with expertise care to clarify?
Also, wow:
https://medium.com/@leagueplayer220/sam-altman-may-have-comm...
I'd guess the board relied on some generally-bad legal advice from their attorneys about how they could get personally sued for libel for airing dirty laundry etc. Not having huge financial stakes, and seemingly having been picked for being conservative rather than risk takers, they followed this to their detriment. Staying quiet let Altman build a following and lead the whole situation, something Altman is seemingly fantastic at doing.
So ultimately what was a pivotal moment in governance of following the nonprofit charter, played quite poorly, ended up being a coup by Altman to escape that one layer of "boxing". Which given how poorly we've done so far at "aligning" centralized capitalism to the needs of most individuals (of which this seems to be a subproblem) wasn't terribly surprising!