Hacker News Reader

Comment by CSMastermind | Hacker News Reader

I believe everything she said about Sam. I don't doubt that he exaggerated how robust their safety processes were, or announced products without telling them first, or used company resources to benefit himself personally while denying he had a financial stake in the company.

I honestly believe that employees did talk about his toxic behavior, the role of a successful startup CEO can be achieved with surprisingly little people management skills.

But the board handled this horribly; it's unsurprising they lost the fight, and frankly, listening to her podcast, the main question I have is why she was on the board in the first place. The level of articulation, the weak framing of events, etc, are what I'd expect to hear out of a middle-level HR rep, not someone on the board of a billion+ dollar company.

View on HN

She got played from day one and is mad because she was the last one to figure it out. Sam brought her on for academic credibility and she didn’t realize how powerless the role was until she made the mistake of attempting to flex that power. She was out maneuvered at every step and had zero business playing in that space, hard elbows are going to be thrown and this now is how she’s dealing with it.

This interview is exactly why she never should have been in that role to begin with.

It's surprisingly a bad look for her. Plus all the criticism to AI itself. She seems set on slowing down AI development, which is clearly at odds with what the company is doing. Why would she event be involved in this company let alone in the board.

> But the board handled this horribly; it's unsurprising they lost the fight, and frankly, listening to her podcast, the main question I have is why she was on the board in the first place. The level of articulation, the weak framing of events, etc, are what I'd expect to hear out of a middle-level HR rep, not someone on the board of a billion+ dollar company.

Your comment sounds more like ad-hominem and character assassination than an actual analysis of the accusations.

Only recently did OpenAI became a billion dollar company. A few years ago it was scrambling for financial support. Nevertheless this is immaterial to the fact that there's a solid accusation of a toxic work culture and shady practices that motivated firing the CEO.

I don't think that paragraph was meant to be an analysis of the accusations themselves, merely suggesting why the messengers fell on their own swords.

I don't think that complaining how articulate a board member was has any relevance to the outcome of a vote. Board members are there to decide, not to be professional entertainers or politicians.

You have a board member mentioning shady practices, lack of accountability, and toxic work culture, and you decided to ignore all that and instead attack the board by focusing on inane details such as how articulate you feel some members were.

> I don't think that complaining how articulate a board member was has any relevance to the outcome of a vote

The lack of articulation didn't have any relevance to the outcome of the vote.

The lack of articulation meant the vote didn't have any impact on who was the CEO a fortnight later.

If people want history to repeat, they are free to not learn lessons from this.

If they want success in the next vote to oust a leader deemed undesirable, they should learn why this one was undone despite the board having the theoretical power.

This is also why I take a dim view of those who can't see why an LLM could be a risk given "it's just words": the right words in the right ears can undo almost any human institution.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com