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Notes -
Non-profit boards tend to attract a certain sort of personality, so it's always possible that their heads just did that (aka e/acc v LW), but I don't really see a clear way for there to be an obvious e/acc v LW trigger point to cause the doorslam so quickly, and the new CEO claims it wasn't over a specific (presumably AI) safety concern. Some alternative possibilities:
Backroom geopolitics. Altman had been a big name and leader for non-nVidia non-Taiwan silicon development and cooperation with other countries to develop that, including the Saudis and China. There are a lot of reasons that might be Against <Domain> Interest here, including domains that can leverage extreme threats to OpenAI/MSFT that can't be discussed publicly without those threats activating, eg ITAR declarations or EU regulations specifically fucking your company over. Short of that, there's also just a lot of sub-LW concerns about these specific countries having unfetterable access to NMUs; I'll point to the Saga Of YOLOv1 as the prototype for that.
Corporate 'bad behavior', regardless of its legal or moral valence. Someone gave an offer the company 'couldn't' refuse, and Altman either didn't present discuss it with the board or didn't accept it (some overlap here with the above: eg a gov said to enforce certain RLHF into the GPTs or they'll encourage copyright lawsuits). Training data came from a source that wasn't disclosed or technically legally-available (eg, Google Books data dump). Employees have been allowed to cart home copies of the newest models on thumb drive, which sometimes gets lost. Basically just some variant of 'CEO did something that could fuck over the bottom line, without permission'.
Just as keku. OpenAI-the-business and OpenAI-the-non-profit are at (intentionally) cross purposes: the business wants to sell services for money, the non-profit wants to limit specific services sold. While most of that disagreement is mutualishly compatible, since Altman doesn't want to sell ClippyGod, there's an unavoidable disagreement where the business wants to sell its own control and the non-profit would rather burn it down than do so. And there's further the CEO (who wants to get paid a lot to do nothing and maybe present a Vision) and the employees (who want to be paid, and in this sorta field paid in a giant IPO-stock-mess). If Altman presented or pushed for a deal with Microsoft that benefited the CEOs, employees, and business at the cost of the board's interests, I don't think he's complain if they took it. But if he got fired in a way that had most of OpenAI's employee assets moved to MSFT directly, he'd cry all the way to the bank.
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