This saga highlights something that I found challenging when I was on the board of a startup, and which the board has completely misplayed. The difference between authority and autonomy. If you're on the board of OpenAI which is doing fantastically well etc you're a big deal. You have a great deal of authority.
You may well think that the structure of the company and how the votes on the board work etc means that any motion you can carry at the board is within the sphere of things you can achieve i.e. that you have autonomy to do anything you can secure the votes for, but that's rarely the case. In actual practise people like the investors and other stakeholders can change the rules if they need to, exercise soft pressure, bring legal suits and do other things. Your autonomy to act is effectively pretty narrow.
However this finally plays out, whether Sam comes back or not, whether openAI's board changes, the people who orchestrated this have seriously damaged themselves and they will most likely have less of both authority and autonomy in future.
This would normally be true, but this is the board of a non-profit that has no investors. If the board actually lacked autonomy, then the article we're commenting on would have been about Altman being re-hired today.
There have been a few stories which sound like he may have had the opportunity to come back but that negotiations over board control etc (which is pretty unsurprising) broke down[1].
Even setting that aside for a second, that doesn't change my essential point that the board doesn't necessarily have all the autonomy it thinks it has. There are for sure repercussions to this - they may have to make concessions. Some of the seemingly committed funding may be unpaid and the donors may have the ability to invoke MAC clauses and similar to pull it. Even if that turns out not to be the case, the way this has played out will certainly affect decisions about future donations etc.
> There have been a few stories which sound like he may have had the opportunity to come back but that negotiations over board control etc (which is pretty unsurprising) broke down[1].
Thus disproving your point, in my opinion. There may now be consequences to the board's decision that make their company less powerful in the future, but it won't be because they lacked the autonomy to make their own decisions. Getting to discover the consequences of your preferences is what autonomy is.
You may well think that the structure of the company and how the votes on the board work etc means that any motion you can carry at the board is within the sphere of things you can achieve i.e. that you have autonomy to do anything you can secure the votes for, but that's rarely the case. In actual practise people like the investors and other stakeholders can change the rules if they need to, exercise soft pressure, bring legal suits and do other things. Your autonomy to act is effectively pretty narrow.
However this finally plays out, whether Sam comes back or not, whether openAI's board changes, the people who orchestrated this have seriously damaged themselves and they will most likely have less of both authority and autonomy in future.